Streamlining IT with "Lean Thinking"

By David Hurwitz, VP Enterprise IT Management, CA | Jul 3, 2009

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CIOs can learn a lot from their counterparts in the manufacturing industry where players have  long perfected a simple and effective process management system that ensures maximum value delivery to the end customer with minimum wastage of time and money. This system — known as Lean Manufacturing or Lean Thinking has been used successfully by Toyota and later Dell in its just-in-time PC making model.

Let the Value Flow
In Lean, the principle of Flow dictates that the value-added steps in a given process should flow in a tight and integrated sequence. As you remove waste from IT, it’s critical to ensure that the remaining process steps are integrated to optimize service delivery. It is especially important to consider the handoff points between different departments as these handoff points are often where wait-time is introduced.

Here, integrated management solutions can automate the workflow between different departments, minimizing wait-time. Management tools can further support optimizing flow by automating key process steps. The degree to which different departments use a set of integrated tools and processes helps optimize the flow of value to the customer.

Just-in-Time IT
Another key Lean principle is Pull, which states that no step should occur until triggered by a “pull” signal from the downstream step. For instance, just as Dell didn’t start building a computer till getting an order for it, IT shouldn’t provision servers till they’re needed. Compare this to the more traditional “push” control mechanism, where capacity or inventory is stockpiled in anticipation of demand.

While pushing capacity into inventory provides a buffer against urgent demand, more often than not it results in waste through incorrect configuration, version control problems, and incipient quality problems.

Hence, one of the primary goals of Lean improvement initiatives is to reduce cycle times to remove the need to perform operations in advance of their pull signals. For instance, if server provisioning takes days or weeks, there will be an inclination to have stand-by servers provisioned just-in-case. A Lean approach would entail streamlining the provisioning process so that it takes only hours or minutes and resources can be provisioned just-in-time.

Incremental Steps Towards Perfection
Another critical Lean principle is Perfection. Like ITIL’s continuous improvement phase, the Lean IT approach recognizes that great gains can be achieved through incremental improvement and that the journey to perfection never ends.

Achieving Lean IT
In achieving Lean IT, three key dimensions need to be considered:

1. Transactional Visibility
To improve customer value, we must know what the customer is experiencing in their business interactions. As virtually all externally facing applications are web-based, the performance of these critical systems must be managed. Modern application performance management systems can monitor the end-to-end customer experience to measure responsiveness, quickly locate the root cause of performance problems, and solve them.

2. Business-IT Engagement
Business-IT engagement requires that IT and business leadership engage in a governance process that uses business-focused metrics as decision support. Further, business users should be able to directly request (i.e., “pull”) tactical and operational requests about the systems they use. Only modern project and portfolio management and service lifecycle management systems let enterprises do this – by providing transparency into the cost, quality and function of every project and service so that the service portfolio can continuously be optimized.

3. Operational Excellence
Strategies to achieve operational excellence include identifying and remediating bottlenecks, automating processes to reduce wait-time and errors, and optimizing IT asset utilization through virtualization and consolidation efforts.

Besides having an infrastructure management system that can accommodate complex, heterogeneous environments and can integrate processes across all layers of the operating stack, enterprises need controlled change management processes. Proper change management helps ensure that changes are scheduled to avoid a negative impact on the business, reducing the risk of unplanned downtime.

ITIL is an excellent complement to any Lean IT initiative in that it lays a framework to address the issues raised from a Lean process review. Lean process exercises will identify where waste exists; ITIL recommends best practices for improving and streamlining processes across the service management lifecycle.

Lean IT can be applied to most IT processes and functions, and it doesn’t require an in-depth knowledge of lean manufacturing. It is a set of very straightforward pragmatic principles that most IT professionals use intuitively already. Highlighting their value focuses IT to use them even more rigorously.