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.Ker, J. I., Wang, Y., Hajli, M. N., Song, J., & Ker, C. W. (2014). "Deploying lean in healthcare: Evaluating information technology effectiveness in US hospital pharmacies". International Journal of Information Management, 34(4), 556–560.
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.Krafcik, John F., « Triumph of the Lean Production System », Sloan Management Review, 1988, 30 (1): 41–52.
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).Littéralement, « penser maigre ».
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).Hanna, Julia. "Bringing 'Lean' Principles to Service Industries ". HBS Working Knowledge. October 22, 2007. (Summary article based on published research of Professor David Upton of Harvard Business School and doctoral student Bradley Staats: Staats, Bradley R., and David M. Upton. "Lean Principles, Learning, and Software Production: Evidence from Indian Software Services.". Harvard Business School Working Paper. No. 08-001. July 2007. (Revised July 2008, March 2009.) Industry analysts have identified many similarities or analogues between IT and manufacturing.Waterhouse, Peter. "Improving IT Economics: Thinking Lean". CA White Paper. November 2008. 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.Masters of Lean IT: How 3 Visionary IT Executives Maximize Value and Minimize Waste. Interviews with John Parkinson (Chief Technology Office, TransUnion), Mike Yorwerth (Group Technology and Architecture Director, Tesco), and Marc Silvester (Chief Technology Office, Fujitsu Services), published by CA, Inc (2009).
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).
+Table 1 – Targets of waste in lean IT Waste element Examples Business outcome Defects Unauthorized system and application changes. Substandard project execution.Poor customer service, increased costs. Overproduction (overprovisioning) Unnecessary delivery of low-value applications and services.Business and IT misalignment, Increased costs and overheads: energy, data center space, maintenance. Waiting Slow application response times. Manual service escalation procedures.Lost revenue, poor customer service, reduced productivity. Non-Value Added Processing Reporting technology metrics to business managers.Miscommunication. Transportation On-site visits to resolve hardware and software issues. Physical software, security and compliance audits.Higher capital and operational expenses. Inventory (excess) Server sprawl, underutilized hardware. Multiple repositories to handle risks and control. Benched application development teams.Increased costs: data center, energy; lost productivity. Motion (excess) Fire-fighting repeat problems within the IT infrastructure and applications.Lost productivity. Employee knowledge (unused) Failing to capture ideas/innovation. Knowledge and experience retention issues. Employees spend time on repetitive or mundane tasks.Talent leakage, low job satisfaction, increased support and maintenance costs.
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 mappingThe value-stream methodology originated at Toyota, where it is known as Material and Information Flow Mapping. See Learning to See: Value-Stream Mapping to Create Value and Eliminate Muda by Mike Rother and John Shook (Lean Enterprise Institute 1999, ). The methodology has since been developed by James Womack and Daniel Roos while researching their seminal book The Machine that Changed the World (see References below). — 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.
Flow Flow relates to one of the fundamental concepts of Lean as formulated within the Toyota Production System — namely, mura. A Japanese word that translates as "unevenness," mura is eliminated through just-in-time systems that are tightly integrated. 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.
A focus on mura reduction and flow may bring benefits that would be otherwise missed by focus on muda (the Japanese word for waste) alone. The former necessitates a system-wide approach whereas the latter may produce suboptimal results and unintended consequences. For example, a software development team may produce code in a language familiar to its members and which is optimal for the team (zero muda). 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.
Pull/demand system Pull (also known as demand) systems are themselves closely related to the aforementioned flow concept. They contrast with push or supply systems. In a pull system, a pull is a service request. The initial request is from the customer or consumer of the product or service. For example, a customer initiates an online purchase. That initial request in turn triggers a subsequent request (for example, a query to a database to confirm product availability), which in turn triggers additional requests (input of the customer's credit card information, credit verification, processing of the order by the accounts department, issuance of a shipping request, replenishment through the supply-chain management system, and so on).
Push systems differ markedly. Unlike the "bottom-up," demand-driven, pull systems, they are "top-down," supply-driven systems whereby the supplier plans or estimates demand. Push systems typically accumulate large inventory stockpiles in anticipation of customer need. 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.
Implementation Implementation begins with identification and description of one or more IT value streams.Rother, Mike; Shook, John. Learning to See: Value-Stream Mapping to Create Value and Eliminate Muda. Lean Enterprise Institute 1999. For example, aided by use of interviews and questionnaires, the value stream for a primary value stream such as a point-of-sale business service may be described as shown in Table 2. +Table 2 – Example: Description of a point-of-sale value stream Value metrics Demand pulls SLIs "Owner" of Business Result EVP of Store OperationsExecutive Vice President CAPEXcapital expenditures OPEXoperating expenses Labor efficiency Ease of use Check-out speed Budget reviews Strategic reviews Store redesign Store openings Transaction speed Service continuity Implementation speed End Customer Cashiers Check-out speed Ease of use Transactions Log ons Transaction speed Service continuity End Customer Shoppers Payment types Check-out speed Ease of use Transactions Transaction speed Service continuity