Lean IT - An Introduction

The growing complexity of IT infrastructure, rising number of services, the rising consumption of services and increased cost of service support has meant that IT is asked to handle more services. This is against the backdrop of a contrarian situation of reducing costs. Improving service quality > going up; and managing costs < going down.

We have seen that IT has often been unable to deliver services in a manner required despite improvements driven through many processes based approaches. Years of growing IT best practices like ITIL and CMMi SVC have seen impact; however there has always been felt that an approach towards leaner IT departments is a growing need. With the many years of application of Lean principles in production industries which have seen consistent improvement in their performances, there has been a growing desire for applying similar Lean principles to IT.

So what is Lean IT?

“Lean IT is the extension of lean manufacturing and lean services principles to the development and management of information technology 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.” - Wikipedia – 2011,

The essential features of Lean were provided by a Landmark publication by Womack and Jones, in 1996, “Lean Thinking”.

Lean is about delivering value to customers with the ability to continuously improve. The principles can be encapsulated through the following:

• Value is defined by the customer. It is about the requirements that a customer has regarding the product or service to be delivered.  Thus the service’s value is seen by the benefit it brings to a customer.
• Value is delivered through a Value Stream. This is the complete process that ensures delivery of value, in a short; time frame.  
• Flow. This is a logical next step for charting the Value stream and implies that the activities involved in providing a service must follow a logical sequence, with minimal interruptions and minimal intermediate stockpiles
• Pull. This implies that the customer has the ability to trigger the value stream in accordance with the need of the value. 
• Perfection. Perfection is about each participant in the value stream is aware of his or her required quality requirement. The concept of continuous improvement comes into play.