So I use LinkedIn the business oriented social network a lot.  It's proven useful for making interesting contacts especially as when I first became a freelance over here I had only a minuscule network of my own. 

And I also play extensively on the Q&A section.  It's often fun, frequently annoying and occasionally downright silly.

I have noticed as have many other regular contributors that about the commonest question posed is from people who have accidentally made themselves 2 or more accounts which aside from being against the rules is a PitA to manage.  But it happens because of LinkedIn's design of the process to accept invitations from other members to link up - the core point of the service.

However because you can invite anyone to join using any of their myriad email addresses it is common that an existing member is invited to link by someone using an email address different from the one you used to join.  And if you are NOT incredibly careful and don't read every line of every screen carefully (yeah like that's going to happen!) you will end up making a new account when you've already got a perfectly good one.  And LinkedIn doesn't provide a way for a member to merge 2 accounts because it assumes you followed the rules and haven't got 2 accounts!

This is such a wonderful example in miniature of a problem so many businesses face.  They swear they are customer focused (because, genuinely, they care about the customer being satisfied) but all their processes and procedures start from an inward facing company point of view and are then imposed on customers as the 'rules' so if it goes wrong it is now the customer's own fault!

LinkedIn is just one I happen to know as I use it a lot but you can see it everywhere.  Government bureaucracies are a classic.  Designed to satisfy internal needs and imposed on customers.  But then spend millions on peripheral systems and processes to make the customer feel loved and wanted anyway.

It's madness.

The starting point should be something like "How do we design our processes and procedures so they are easy for the customer, have minimal risk of human error AND work for us?". 

Whereas what actually happens too often is "We'll make the customer to do things our way and shower him/her with love and affection and try to convince them it's for their own good".

It's madness.