V•Sensei

The philosophy behind lean is continuous improvement - change is the norm.  This approach keeps companies moving forward and challenging their teams to improve year after year.  IT departments, on the other hand, are tasked with planning for a controlled and optimized infrastructure with a minimal amount of change to the applications.  While both objectives are valid, this rift highlights an age-old problem of operations and IT struggling to find alignment. Many business leaders in the Lean Community feel that IT stays in a comfort zone of efficiency and productivity by focusing on gains in back-office operations rather than actually enabling flexibility, innovation, and finally a strong competitive position that drives growth and profitability. While this lack of alignment between the lean enterprise and IT creates challenges - it also creates opportunities.

The first step is to identify some areas where we can integrate IT and Lean Enterprise best practices to drive major financial savings.  One example would be procurement.  Procurement relies heavily on large amounts of complex data, and Business Intelligence applications linked with Lean Procurement strategies can drive large financial returns.

| More...