The picture below is shared frequently on LinkedIn as a “Lean Boarding pass”. This picture is compared to a conventional boarding pass. The “celebration factor” of the post is that by applying lean to the way printed boarding passes are laid out, you can create a printed boarding pass that is much simpler.

Exactly three years ago, on 9/13/ 2020, I wrote an article on my blog site (reproduced below), highlighting why we should not waste time on improving processes and products that are losing relevancy. If you travel frequently, you may have observed that many airports don’t even ask for your boarding pass at security check kiosks in the last two years.

Are we taking the same approach in our enterprise digital transformation journey? This is the question we explore in this week’s episode of “Think About It.”

Post from September 13, 2020:

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First of all, to be fair- the “lean” boarding pass does look much simpler and much easier to interpret. However, that is not the crux. And also, this was just an “illustrative” post, as in, this was not something that has been done. Do you need to over-engineer something that should not exist at all in this age or is close to defunct like a printed boarding pass?

To me, it is as irritating as a mobile check deposit. A”Digital” process that does not eliminate paper checks at all. You still need to take a picture of a paper check. So stupid! Yes, the processing time has shortened, but this has been around for a while now. I was expecting that FinTech experts at leading banks would have come up with some ways ( I can think of one approach using Blockchain, but I am not a FinTech expert, so I can’t vouch it will work or how impossible it will be to implement) to make it a purely Digital process by now.

It is also as irritating as a paper receipt from a CC transaction-that gets printed without me asking for it, more often than not. In this age of Digital banking, those receipts are redundant for those who bank online, yet many locations print them by default. What a waste of paper and Ink!

And I am rambling because I believe this mindset exists in the way we embark on digital “transformation” journey.

Typically, functional leaders at organizations would hire external partners. Then, the top leadership needs to see “justification” (read $$$) for the fees the external partners charge. The functional leaders who have hired these external partners then pressure the external partners to show “quick wins”. Many of these quick wins may come from creating efficiencies in processes that would be totally transformed or become obsolete in a true digital transformation (and functional leaders may be made aware of this fact).

So organizations spend resources on those “low hanging” fruits in these obsolete processes/methods/org structures. Then, they will reinvest resources to transform/eliminate them in later stages of transformation. They have over-engineered something that should have been left untouched- it would be eliminated. The fact is, any initial savings get nullified, and in the net- you may have actually wasted resources. So essentially, even though it looked like that- there was no “low-hanging fruit”.

Don’t develop Lean boarding passes in your digital transformation journey.

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