Lean IT is the extension of lean manufacturing and lean services principles to the development and management of information technology (IT) products and services. Its central concern, applied in the context of IT, is the elimination of waste, where waste is work that adds no value to a product or service. organization's culture.
History In 1988, American engineer John Krafcik published an article entitled "Triumph of the Lean Production System", based on his thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Sloan School of Management. Prior to this, Krafcik was a quality engineer at NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing), a Toyota - General Motors joint venture in Fremont, California. At MIT, Krafcik's research continued as part of the International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP), which led to the publication, in 1990, of The Machine That Changed the World, co-authored by James Tim Womack (en), Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Ross. The book was a worldwide success. The lean school was formalized in the US in the 1990s, popularized by the book Lean Thinking (1996) by Daniel T. Jones and James P. Womack (the latter trained in Hajime Ohba's methods as part of Toyota's supplier support unit in the USA).
Extension to IT As lean manufacturing has become more widely implemented, the extension of lean principles is beginning to spread to IT (and other service industries). Industry analysts have identified many similarities or analogues between IT and manufacturing. For example, whereas the manufacturing function manufactures goods of value to customers, the IT function "manufactures" business services of value to the parent organization and its customers. Similar to manufacturing, the development of business services entails resource management, demand management, quality control, security issues, and so on. Moreover, the migration by businesses across virtually every industry sector towards greater use of online or e-business services suggests a likely intensified interest in Lean IT as the IT function becomes intrinsic to businesses' primary activities of delivering value to their customers. Already, even today, IT's role in business is substantial, often providing services that enable customers to discover, order, pay, and receive support. IT also provides enhanced employee productivity through software and communications technologies and allows suppliers to collaborate, deliver, and receive payment. Consultants and evangelists for Lean IT identify an abundance of waste across the business service "production line", including legacy infrastructure and fractured processes. By reducing waste through application of lean Enterprise IT Management (EITM) strategies, CIOs and CTOs in companies such as Tesco, Fujitsu Services, and TransUnion are driving IT from the confines of a back-office support function to a central role in delivering customer value.
Types of waste Lean IT promises to identify and eradicate waste that otherwise contributes to poor customer service, lost business, higher than necessary business costs, and lost employee productivity. To these ends, Lean IT targets eight elements within IT operations that add no value to the finished product or service or to the parent organization (see Table 1).
Whereas each element in the table can be a significant source of waste in itself, linkages between elements sometimes create a cascade of waste (the so-called domino effect). For example, a faulty load balancer (waste element: Defects) that increases web server response time may cause a lengthy wait for users of a web application (waste element: Waiting), resulting in excessive demand on the customer support call center (waste element: Excess Motion) and, potentially, subsequent visits by account representatives to key customers' sites to quell concerns about the service availability (waste element: Transportation). In the meantime, the company's most likely responses to this problem — for example, introducing additional server capacity and/or redundant load balancing software), and hiring extra customer support agents — may contribute yet more waste elements (Overprovisioning and Excess Inventory).
Principles
Value streams IT, value streams the provides service by the IT function to the parent organization for use by customers, suppliers, employees, investors, regulators, the media, and any other stakeholders. These services may be further differentiated into:
Business services (primary value streams). Examples: point-of-sale transaction processing, ecommerce, and supply chain optimization IT services (secondary value streams). Examples: application performance management, data backup, and service catalog The distinction between primary and secondary value streams is meaningful. Given Lean IT's objective of reducing waste, where waste is work that adds no value to a product or service, IT services are secondary (i.e. subordinate or supportive) to business services. In this way, IT services are tributaries that feed and nourish the primary business service value streams. If an IT service is not contributing value to a business service, it is a source of waste. Such waste is typically exposed by value-stream mapping.
Value-stream mapping Lean IT, like its lean manufacturing counterpart, involves a methodology of value-stream mapping — diagramming and analyzing services (value streams) into their component process steps and eliminating any steps (or even entire value streams) that do not deliver value.
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