Lean Business Technology

Continued from Friday

Components are integrated over an enterprise service bus that supports the assembly and re-configuration of applications that ultimately enable the common capabilities of the business. Legacy systems are initially wrapped so that they can be integrated over the service bus, and eventually rationalized out in a cycle of continuous improvement and waste reduction.

Business benefits can be substantial. By reducing redundancy and complexity, platforming reduces the cost of maintaining systems and integrating new components. As the core processes of the business are incrementally improved, the underlying application components are able to keep pace. Components are smaller; integration is standards based.

The enterprise is more agile and resilient to change; it becomes “Lean”. 3. Lean Methods Lean Business Technology is based on a service-oriented paradigm; it is also a fundamentally different way of working.

It is a better way to drive collaboration between business and IT to deliver improved business performance. Toyota was able to become the world’s leading car company not through the theory of just-in-time, or statistical quality control - but through the Toyota Way.

Often business change programmes are launched with great fanfare and burning platforms. The Toyota Way makes business change and improvement part of the daily work of everyone at Toyota. Customers work with marketing people who work with engineering people who work with factory workers on the floor.

Quality is improved by promoting a culture of quality in the small teams who work daily with their specific components. The team is the source of seemingly small and incremental improvements that have added up to a core process that consistently delivers the highest quality products in the world.

An Agile-based approach to systems development works well within LBT. Large, complex programs are delivered incrementally. Programs are organised into smaller, self-directed teams of business and IT people that deliver new or improved services in sprints.

These smaller teams are focused on providing the right quality of service that their common capability will deliver. Software components are designed and assembled out of the platforms to provide the applications required. Each component being developed is thoroughly tested in an environment that predicts the end customer’s experience of the service being delivered.

In Lean methods, the quality of service delivered by a component is the primary focus. Getting something wrong always degrades a customer’s experience - the challenge is getting it right first time every time.

Lean methods represent the desired customer experience through “customer stories” that describe a customer’s journey through a specific narrative of a core process. These stories are decomposed into the common capabilities and components that together deliver the services into this end-to-end customer experience.

Conclusion The 2009 JD Power customer satisfaction survey ranks Toyota’s Lexus as the “most satisfying brand” for the ninth year running. In this latest survey, the Lexus RX takes first place in the individual car category.

The Toyota Prius claims second. While the current economic conditions are difficult for their industry, and other companies are going bankrupt, Toyota will clearly weather the storm. From modest beginnings, Toyota is now larger than Ford and GM combined, with a net margin that is over three times the auto industry average.

At the heart of Toyota is a Lean Manufacturing method that drives daily continuous improvement within the company. Now the Toyota Way has gone beyond the mass production of automobiles and is a heartbeat for all other types of manufacturing. The revolution is now starting in the service industries to apply lean thinking to improve quality and drive out waste.

LBT is a new way to apply lean methods to business process improvement and IT. LBT offers a way for IT to apply the proven approaches of leading companies like Toyota to lower costs, reduce cycle time, and deliver the highest quality experience to its customers.