Thinking Lean
Thinking lean is difficult. It requires a wider lens on what is efficient.
Information technology has never been particularly lean, nor has it really enabled other organizations to become leaner.
Information technology layers abstraction upon abstraction and actually makes value creating activities harder to see.
Even technology that attempts to digital replicate cool lean techniques like Kanban systems add more noise and more queues to already cluttered channels.
The problem is not immediately obvious because information is infinite and unbounded. It can be everywhere, and it can be nowhere at the same time.
Status updates and presence monitoring does necessarily speed up information flow when it is distributed across a group of potentially interested information consumers.
Since people are often working asynchronously and on multiple projects, vital information might be held up in a queue waiting for the individual with the information to come up for air from the crisis that they were called in to resolve.
Meanwhile, the information queues up and everybody gets a little bit further behind and stuck in bigger and bigger queues.
Knowledge work is not sequential and attempts to make it sequential are not likely to succeed.