[3] 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.
Already, even today, IT's role in business is substantial, often providing services that enable customers to discover, order, pay, and receive support.
Consultants and evangelists for Lean IT identify an abundance of waste across the business service "production line", including legacy infrastructure and fractured processes.
[8] 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.
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).
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).
In IT, value streams are the services provided by the IT function to the parent organization for use by customers, suppliers, employees, investors, regulators, the media, and any other stakeholders.
For example, a server provisioning process may carry little or no inventory (a waste element in Table 1 above) with labor and materials flowing smoothly into and through the value stream.
But if that language lacks an API standard by which business partners may access the code, a focus on mura will expose this otherwise hidden source of waste.
In IT, push systems often introduce waste through an over-abundance of "just-in-case" inventory, incorrect product or service configuration, version control problems, and incipient quality issues.
The demand pulls or purposes for which the EVP may seek these metrics might be to conduct a budget review or undertake a store redesign.
The table further illustrates how other users of the point-of-sale service — notably, cashiers and shoppers — may be concerned with other value metrics, demand pulls, and SLAs.
[9] In-keeping with this tendency, recessions initially provoke aggressive (and sometimes panic-ridden) actions such as deep discounting, fire sales of excess inventory, wage freezes, short-time working, and abandonment of former supplier relationships in favor of less costly supplies.
[18] Lean IT can expect to garner support during economic downturns as business leaders seek initiatives that deliver more enduring value than is achievable through reactive and generalized cost-cutting.
[25] This migration is likely to accelerate still further as companies seek to leverage investments in service-oriented architectures, decrease costs, improve efficiency, and increase access to customers, partners, and employees.
Though not born of the same motivations, lean IT initiatives are congruent with a broad movement towards conservation and waste reduction, often characterized as green policies and practices.
[30] For instance, implementation of Lean IT initiatives is likely to save energy through adoption of virtualization technology and data center consolidation.
[35] The conclusions or recommendations of Lean IT initiatives are likely to demand organizational, operational, and/or behavioral changes that may meet with resistance from workers, managers, and even senior executives.
Whether driven by a fear of job losses, a belief that existing work practices are superior, or some other concern, such changes may encounter resistance.
[3][36] Even though business services and the ensuing flow of information may span multiple departments, IT organizations are commonly structured in a series of operational or technology-centric silos, each with its own management tools and methods to address perhaps just one particular aspect of waste.
[8] Related to the aforementioned issue of fragmented IT departments is the lack of integration across the entire supply chain, including not only all business partners but also consumers.
[37] In this regard, the processes of provision and consumption are tightly integrated and streamlined to minimize total cost and waste and to create new sources of value.
[3] In this light, the potential of Lean IT to increase productivity by as much as 40% while improving the quality and speed of execution[3] makes ADM a primary target within the IT department.
This particular employee may need a CAD workstation as well as standard office productivity software and limited access to the company's extranet.
[39] Among notable corporate examples of Lean IT adopters is UK-based grocer Tesco,[40] which has entered into strategic partnerships with many of its suppliers, including Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and Coca-Cola, eventually succeeding in replacing weekly shipments with continuous deliveries throughout the day.
It seeks incremental waste reduction and value enhancement, but it does not require a grand overhaul of an existing process, and is complementary rather than alternative to other methodologies.
It uses some form of kanban system to visualize and limit work in progress, and follows the PDCA cycle, and continuous improvements, that is the base of Lean.
[47] The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) from the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a process improvement approach applicable to a single project, a division, or an entire organization.
[48] However, unlike Lean IT, CMMI (and other process models) doesn't directly address sources of waste such as a lack of alignment between business units and the IT function or unnecessary architectural complexity within a software application.
[49] It provides managers, auditors, and IT users a set of metrics, processes, and best practices to assist in maximizing the benefits derived through the use of IT, achieving compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, and aligning IT investments with business objectives.