Inside cover
At a glance
- Workflow replaced governance.
- The gap is the space where decisions, ownership, and memory used to live.
- Closing it is a design problem, not an effort problem.
“We automated the ticket. We forgot the decision.”
Preface
This book is about a substitution that nobody voted for.
Over forty years, enterprise software learned to move work. It learned to route, to escalate, to approve, to close. It learned to measure everything that could be timed. And in the process, it quietly convinced the organization that moving work was the same thing as governing it.
It is not.
Governance is the act of deciding — who owns what, what we accept, what we refuse, what we remember, and what we are prepared to live with. Workflow is the act of executing whatever was decided, whether or not anyone actually decided anything. When workflow expands into the space where governance should live, the organization keeps moving, keeps closing tickets, keeps hitting SLAs — and slowly loses the ability to explain why any of it is happening.
That loss is the governance gap. This book is about how it opened, what it costs, and how to close it.