In an effort to improve productivity and more efficient business operations, many organizations have adopted lean manufacturing or lean service principles. As these principles have been more widely implemented, business owners should consider exploring the concepts as it applies to technology. The concept of Lean IT can help companies not only improve the efficiency of their IT processes and services, but also reduce waste related to both lost productivity as well as hard costs throughout the business. By definition, Lean IT promises to identify and eradicate waste that contributes to poor customer service, lost business, inflated business costs, and lost employee productivity.
By implementing Lean IT, businesses focus on evaluating value and quality before implementing in a new product or service by investing the time to test a product to make sure it works as advertised. Processes that involve multiple people, are repeated more than a couple of times per month, and/or cross an organizational boundary are primary candidates for Lean IT principles. Leaders should seek proven solutions to automate as many of these repetitive, inefficient practices as possible. If users are complaining that it takes too long to accomplish something or that performance quality is poor, many more traditional IT teams are not agile enough to be able to make necessary changes to improve performance to meet employee demands.
One of the first steps towards implementing Lean IT is to identify and “map” services, also known as Value Streams. The Value Streams should be divided into Business Services, or primary value streams, and IT services, which are secondary value streams. Each stream should be broken down into their component process steps and any step that doesn’t deliver value should be eliminated or automated if possible. IT services should be evaluated to determine if they contribute direct value and support to a business service. IT service providers who practice Lean IT should be able to put Lean concepts into terms the business owner can understand, help identify and evaluate value streams and be able to apply Lean in technical areas to support the business functions.
An added benefit of applying Lean IT is the reduction of energy consumption and carbon emissions, the basic tenants of GreenIT. As Lean IT providers implement virtualization technology and consolidate equipment, businesses will realize the added value of reducing hardware costs, network management, and power consumption by more than 50%.
Since 1992, The Launch Pad has been partnering with our clients to dramatically reduce their total cost of technology ownership, evaluate and streamline their business processes, improving overall productivity and efficiency in the business. In an effort to help our small and medium sized businesses incorporate green strategies and move to a consolidated, cost-effective virtual technology environment, The Launch Pad has developed, integrated and packaged a virtualization solution priced for nonenterprise clients; RevITup VirtualGreen Office™. Part of The Launch Pad’s Easy-to- GreenIT™ Initiative, this turnkey solution includes our design, installation, licenses, migration and training of existing staff.
To learn how your business can benefit from virtualization, cloud services, and hosted applications, signup for a Free RevITup SilverCloud Assessment. For more information on solutions for running your businesses’ technology more efficiently, visit our website or contact Megan Meisner at mmeisner@launchpadonline.com or 813 448-7100 x210
