Book: Lean IT: Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation

(CRC Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- An information technology (IT) organization is expected to “align with the business.” That is, IT is supposed to enable business performance and innovation, improve service levels, manage change, take advantage of emerging technologies, and maintain quality and stability, all while steadily reducing operating costs. Yet when an enterprise begins a lean transformation, too often the IT department is either left out or viewed as an obstacle. What is to be done? Lean IT: Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation by Steven C. Bell and Michael A. Orzen (CRC Press, 2010) shares practical tips, examples, and case studies to help you establish a culture of continuous improvement to deliver IT operational excellence and business value to your organization. The book is set to be released Sept. 16, 2010.

Lean IT provides the first comprehensive and definitive resource on lean IT, offering tools, methods, and metrics supported by practical examples and case studies. Authors Bell and Orzen address the intersection of lean, Six Sigma, and information systems, and illustrate how to apply the principles of lean to IT operations to achieve improved quality and performance. Divided into five sections, the books covers:

Foundation • Why does lean IT matter?
• Foundations of lean
• The lean IT and business partnership

Integration: Aligning Lean IT and the Business • Lean IT and business process improvement
• Lean IT lessons learned from lean manufacturing: flow and pull
• Lean management systems

Performance: IT Operational Excellence • Lean IT operations: ITIL and cloud computing
• Lean software development
• Applying lean to project management

Leadership Road Map • Leading the lean IT transformation
• A lean IT road map

Lean IT Case Studies  

Praise for Lean IT

“This book will have a permanent place in my bookshelf," says Gene Kim, chief technology officer of Tripwire Inc. and co-author of The Visible Ops Handbook and Visible Ops Security (IT Process Institute Inc., 2008). “In my 10-year study of high-performing IT organizations, I’ve found that businesses rely on IT far more than they think. The impacts of poor flow from application development into IT operations can be devastating: ever-increasing cycle times and amounts of rework, and an ever-increasing amount of heroics required in IT operations to preserve the illusion of stability and reliability.”

Steve Castellanos, lean enterprise director at Nike Inc., emphasizes the increasing importance of lean in business. “There has never been a more critical time to improve how IT integrates with the global business enterprise,” he says. “This book provides an unprecedented look at the role that lean will play in making this revolutionary shift and the critical steps for sustained success.” 

Scott W. Ambler, chief methodologist for Agile and lean, IBM Rational, and author of Agile Modeling and Enterprise Unified Process (Wiley, 2002), concurs. “Twenty years from now, the firms which dominate their industries will have fully embraced lean strategies throughout their IT organizations,” he predicts. “Ten years from now, those organizations will have started pulling ahead of their competitors as the result of lean IT. Today this book will show those organizations the path they need to start out on.” 

About the authors

Stephen C. Bell brings more than 20 years’ experience in finance, operations management, and information systems. He is the author of Lean Enterprise Systems, Using IT for Continuous Improvement (Wiley, 2005).

Michael A. Orzen delivers a unique blend of IT, operations management, lean, Six Sigma, and project management. With a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford University and a master of business administration from the University of Oregon, Orzen has been consulting, coaching, and teaching for more than 20 years.

Bell and Orzen are faculty members of the Lean Enterprise Institute. Together, the authors combine their experience in information systems and process improvement to share their lessons learned.

About The Author