Gatekeepers
It is a reflective morning as I deal with nagging lower back pain that kept me from doing the things I love this past weekend -- 🏊🏼🚴🏼♂️🏃🏻➡️!
As someone who thrives on forward-looking, proactive approaches, being abruptly pulled into the present or past by an external force is always a jarring experience.
I prefer to build what could be instead of maintaining what is. When something is broken, I like to fix it and quickly move on with my plans. So, being put in the awkward position of rest and recovery, where stasis is the prescribed treatment, makes me a little antsy.
This morning, my antsy brain made some connections as I tried to work through a 10-minute mindfulness meditation.1 I was thinking about digital transformation projects, which are usually stalled by outside forces, not internal pressures. That is, the teams working on the projects are typically engaged, energized, and eager to create efficiencies in the system. The outside voices, the gatekeepers, usually create unnecessary policies or delays to deflect the inevitability of progress.
By doing so, they become the gatekeepers to a gate without a fence.
Digital transformation's first step is to knock down the fences that prevent the transparent flow of data—to disassemble the barriers so the organization can be more efficient in processing and sharing data/knowledge/information. In doing so, the "Please close the gate" policy becomes silly, and those tasked with compliance are unnecessary.
My stance is not against compliance; rather, I advocate for a more comprehensive understanding and shared responsibility for compliance within the larger group during the digital transformation process.
For example, digitizing a paper form may render the gatekeeper reviewing the form irrelevant, as the digital process automates compliance. Again, we are redistributing the compliance responsibility from one to many.
Digital transformation involves redistributing inefficient tasks to more efficient ones. In this case, efficiency and compliance requirements are met when the team creates rules to review every input within the form before submission rather than having a compliance person review every form submitted.
Digital transformation turns gatekeepers into manure spreaders, transferring more knowledge (as fertilizer) across the many pastures of allocated work.
#digitaltransformation #digitalproduct
Also, for those of you who are keeping track, I failed my mindfulness meditation this morning, as I was utterly distracted from the present, constructing the outline of this post when I should have been focusing on my breathing.