Lean IT is the extension of lean services and manufacturing principle applied to manage, create and develop IT services and products. It emphasizes the activity of eliminating the unnecessary things that are not needed in the production. Those unnecessary things have no value at all. The core goal is to maximize the value of the customers and consumers while the waste is minimized. In a very simple way, lean creates big value to the customers and consumers with a few resource used in the production. So, in order to accomplish this, lean IT thinking will change the emphasis of the management though optimization of separate assets, technologies and vertical departments to maximize the flow of services and products through the entire value flowing horizontally across the assets, technologies and departments to the consumers.
Lean IT for the Production and Services
There is a prominent misconception that Lean IT is only suited for manufacturing. Well then, it is not true. Lean can be applied in every agile business and in every business process. It is not either a cost reduction program or a tactic but it is a way of acting and thinking for the entire organization.
The business in all sectors like government and healthcare are primarily using Lean IT principles in whatever they do and think. Many of the organizations are hesitant to use the term lean but they are labeling it based on their own system like Toyota Production System or Danaher Business System. Want to know why? It is because lean is not an obvious program or a term used for cost reduction but it is the way the company operates. This is often used to characterize the company to switch from the old way of thinking to the lean way of thinking. It requires a complete transformation on the way the company conducts the business. This will take a long term perseverance and perspective.
Purpose, Process and People
These are the three fundamental issues on business that will serve as a guide to the transformation of the organization. The managers, together with the executives must embark on the lean transformations.
Purpose
What are the customer’s problem that can be solved by the enterprise to achieve its purpose of prospering?
Process
How will organization assess the major value stream in order to make sure that each step is valuable, available, capable, flexible, adequate and all steps are linked by pull, flow and leveling?
People
How will the organization ensure that in every important procedures made, there is someone responsible for the continually evaluation of the value stream in the lean process and business purpose? How can everyone touch the value stream actively in the correct operation and improvement of it?
Lean fully understands the value of the customers, so it focuses on increasing the continued process on the thing that is most importantly needed. The ultimate action is to give a perfect and sustainable value to customers through perfect creation processing of value that is zero waste.
— Slimane Zouggari