Lean IT Service Management
Posted on 14. May, 2009 by Sunit Prakash in Lean Management
LeanITSM; pronounced lean-it-ism
–action noun
1. the application of Lean Principles to IT
Origin:
Date not known; Lean comes from the Toyota Manufacturing Method, IT Service Management comes from OGC; together now as LeanITSM
Lean is becoming fashionable in IT. In October 2008, ServiceTALK, the journal of the IT Service Management Forum ran a cover story called “The Path to Lean Business”. More recently CA announced LeanIT, a set of tools that use Lean thinking in delivering IT Service Management. Somewhat paradoxically CA’s LeanIT refers to Fujitsu, a Japanese company, already practicing Lean IT and have products & services around it.
With the increased pressure on CIOs to reduce costs and increase efficiency, availability, reliability & generally deliver business value – applying Lean Principles to IT has started to get increasing attention.
A basic premise of Lean is that every process or activity needs to add value to the customer. Value is anything the customer is willing to pay for; conversely, waste is any activity or process that does not add value.
With respect to “value” & “IT”, John Thorp in his article on the Val IT Framework in ISACA’s Information Systems Control Journal (volume 5, 2008) says “all enterprises large or small, private or public, for-profit or not-for-profit exist to deliver value to their stakeholders, be they owners or shareholders of private companies, recipients of services or taxpayers. One critical challenge that enterprises face is how to ensure that they realize value from their increasingly large-scale and complex investment in information technology and IT-enabled change”
This is exactly where Lean Principles can help.
He further says “Val IT is relevant to all management levels across both the business and IT functions – from the CIO and the C-suite, to those directly involved and responsible for the selection, procurement, development, implementation, deployment and benefits-realization process.” I would add to that in addition to all of the above, also in the day to day “business as usual” running of IT operations so as to optimize people, processes and tools so as to eliminate waste and squeeze maximum value out of the total system.
Typical steps an organization follows when looking at using Lean to improve performance are:
- Identifying, at a minimum, all the major problem areas that need to be improved
- Identification of low hanging fruit as immediate issues that can easily be addressed for quick wins
- Setting up empowered teams and training them
- Measuring the “as is” state by way of agreed and relevant metrics and measures
- Running Kaizen workshops and using Lean techniques to identify the root cause of a given problem; a key step here is “value stream mapping” – remember, every step in the process needs to add value; if not, it needs to be eliminated
- Identifying specific steps for improvement; this step assigns responsibility for executing the specific step, the outcome and relates to a metric that will be impacted and improved
- Executing the plan
- Measuring and comparing the new state vs. the old state and showing the improvement by way of agreed metrics
- Repeating and improving again by identifying new areas, or further steps
Examples of these could be: improving the end to end change management process time, reducing the number of defects in new versions and releases, reducing the number of outages on critical systems etc. Each of these initiatives will have metrics associated with them to show improvements. Showing operational efficiencies in these particular processes will also manifest itself in better customer satisfaction scores. Some of these will result in
Useful Links :
CA : www.ca.com
IBM :www.ibm.com
Fujitsu : www.fujitsu.com
ISACA : www.isaca.org
IT Sceptic :www.itskeptic.org
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