Lean IT is an addition of lean production and lean facilities philosophies to the expansion and information technology management of products. Its main concern, functional in IT concept, is the eradication of waste which improves no charge to products and services.
While lean ideologies are largely recognized and have wide-ranging applicability, expansion of manufacturing to IT had just emerged. It positions important tasks for experts while upholding the assurance of no fewer significant paybacks. And whereas its advantages can be narrow in range and provide results fast, implementing this is an ongoing development that could possibly yield years ahead of lean principles to develop intrinsically to an establishment’s tradition.
It intends to detect and remove waste that causes customer service to be poor, business loss, business costs raise, and reduced productivity among employees. In this line, it aims eight components inside IT processes that produce no charge to finished products, services or the core institute.
The eight waste elements of lean IT includes the following:
• Defects
• Overproduction (Overprovisioning)
• Waiting
• Non-Value Added Processing
• Transportation
• Inventory (Excess)
• Motion (Excess)
• Employee Knowledge (Unused)
Defects are illegal system, application modifications and insufficient project implementation which results to insufficient customer service and increased expenses.
Excessive transport of low-cost applications falls under overproduction which causes IT misalignment, higher costs on data space, maintenance and energy.
Waiting is slow application responses and manual service acceleration measures resulting to less productivity.
Giving information on technology metrics to corporate executives that may sometimes lead to miscommunication non-value added processing.
Transportation on the other hand are on-site appointments to solve matters on software, issues on hardware, checking of physical software, compliance and security and this quite affects operational costs.
Inventory (Excess) causes raise in data center and energy expenses plus there is a loss in productivity because of multiple sources to handle threats and control.
Motion (Excess) is about resolving repetitive problems inside the IT structure and applications. Less productivity may occur.
Last would be the Employee Knowledge wherein some employees fail to grasp ideas and advances. They encounter retention issues and time spent on dreary or ordinary tasks.
Each element can cause waste; connections amongst elements sometimes generate a queue of waste like a domino effect.
Services like Value streams are delivered by IT function towards the organization for customer use, suppliers, personnel, stockholders, managers, media and other investors. These services are classified into:
Business services
Example: point-of-sale transaction processing
IT services
Example: data backup
The division between business and IT value streams is significant. Agreed Lean IT’s aim of decreasing waste, IT services are second to business services. By this, IT services became branches that feed the primary business service. Once an IT service does not pay worth to a business service, it is a spring of waste. Wastes are shown by mapping of value-streams.
Lean IT involves a scheme of value-stream mapping which is the diagramming and examining services into their element process stages and entirely excluding any stage that does not deliver value since they will surely become excess waste.
— Slimane Zouggari