Why IT departments fail in our organizations and why lean management is the only thing that can save them

FEATURED ARTICLE – Traditionally seen as the root of all evil, the IT department in our organizations has a lot to do before reaching its potential and becoming a true enabler in the delivery of excellent products and services. In recent years, IT leaders have realized that lean management can help them transform the function.

On his first day of work at the headquarters of a bank in Paris, François went to the office full of energy and expectations. He was thrilled with his new job and eager to get started.

He met his new manager, Antoine: “Bonjour!”, he said, “We are happy to have you with us. Let me show you your desk”. Antoine led François through the office, stopping a few times to introduce him to other team members. Eventually, they found an empty desk, with no computer or phone. There were just a few cables and a stapler. A depressing sight, François thought.

“Oh, darn! IT must not have seen my note saying you would start today. Let me call them, and we'll get everything sorted out in a moment”, Antoine said apologetically. François sat in his new chair and waited patiently. Two hours later, Antoine came back and said IT had called to say they would set everything up the next day. In fact, two weeks went by before his computer arrived and was connected to a printer and to the company's servers.

During those long, agonizing days, François constantly had to bother his colleagues asking for information and was able to get almost nothing done. His enthusiasm quickly vanished, and he began to feel frustration and stress.

Why did it take two weeks to connect a computer and create an e-mail address, something that takes at most an hour of IT work?

Unfortunately, there are examples of this everywhere, which tells us how great the need for change in IT is. Our criticism of the large amount of bureaucracy and the poor quality of delivery that plague the IT function is aggravated by the sense of disconnect we perceive between our personal experience as IT users and the professional IT environments in which we work. It is so easy to install an app on our smartphone, buy something on Amazon and find music on Spotify; so why can't we make our IT departments work?

In recent years, the lean movement has begun to explore ways in which IT can deliver better service to its customers, simplify its processes and truly make people's lives easier in the organization.

There are three main reasons why IT has begun to accept the idea that lean can really help a lot

The first reason is that there is an expectation that IT will deliver better services faster to its customers. Constant complaints (“this problem wouldn't have happened if IT had done a better job”) are encouraging leaders in the area to review their processes, to really understand where the problems are and what the value is, and to embrace PDCA. This often results in an attempt to apply small, iterative changes to the process instead of trying to transform the IT function all at once, which is very expensive and difficult to manage.

Second, CIOs are showing more interest in the lean improvements happening in many areas of their organizations, and are becoming more open to taking part in the business transformation (and perhaps even facilitating it).

Finally, an increase in the number of digital transformations and the resulting need to buy digital products (such as apps) are quickly focusing business leaders' attention on reducing lead-times.

This is a difficult but exciting time to be a CIO. With so many problems to be solved, IT leaders are beginning to recognize lean as a way of bringing structure to a traditionally complex and disorganized function.

WHAT PROBLEMS DOES IT NEED TO SOLVE?

One of the main problems IT faces is a lack of collaboration and poor information flow. Often, it is not clear who does what (otherwise, why would seven different people be involved in the simple task of connecting a new computer?) or what the customer's requirements are.

IT departments often offer a below-average product/service that will need a lot of rework and will cause major delays. In addition, the many people in the process and a poor system for sharing information lead to a situation in which nobody understands why a problem is happening.

Lean can contribute a great deal to fixing this: by identifying customer value and uncovering problems and making them visible, making the lives of everyone in the company easier, supporting internal users and enabling a more positive relationship between IT and its users (based on collaboration and communication). As a result, productivity increases, and the workplace becomes a stress-free environment.

Another problem CIOs need to solve is reliability. Imagine searching for something on Google, an action we perform several times a day. There is not a single moment when Google is not working – in fact, many of us would feel completely lost if that happened! Still, for some reason, our companies' internal IT systems are far from reliable, and we have grown used to having different expectations of our systems from those that Google and our online bank (for example) give us.

There is a new challenge for IT – another one that lean can help solve: the concepts of jidoka and built-in quality teach us to see each problem as an opportunity to ask what we can do differently. This way of approaching work gradually reduces the instability of the system.