Do I need to be in that discussion? Isn’t just an IT discussion?

Or isn’t just a Legal discussion? A operations discussion?

There is a fine line between useless meetings and diverse discussions. Useless the line is in our head. The check out line. And unfortunately we ‘check out’ at the wrong time.

Digital transformation requires diversity of opinion. We can’t expect legal to understand what is and isn’t critical for business operations. When we do, operations gets frustrated and blames legal for putting annoying constraints on their work. And we can substitute legal for HR, IT, and other departments.

One of the best finance persons I ever worked with was Mark. He was brilliant. We would often ‘clash’ over budget lines or allocations. But we would listen to each other. And as a result, he would often say, ‘You can’t do it that way, but if we did it this way, would it work for you?” And usually it did. Or when it didn’t, we brainstormed options together till we found a solution that did.

But here’s the thing. We would never get there if we left budget to finance and implementation to operations.

And here’s another thing. Until operations view that data sharing agreement, which legal is working on, as theirs. As part of implementation. It will be both a poor agreement and likely highly annoying. And if we flip the coin for a moment, if you don’t go to that operations meeting to understand what they are doing. Well, you’ll likely waste a lot of time with re-writes or do something that operations are annoyed with or simply ignore. You will isolate yourself.

So no, it is not ‘just’ a Legal, IT, HR, finance or operations discussion. It’s a team discussion. It’s not time to check out, it’s a critical discussion.

So please join us.

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