Lean IT is the
extension of lean manufacturing and lean services principles to the development and management of
information technology (IT) products and services. Its central concern, applied
in the context of IT, is the elimination of waste, where waste is work that
adds no value to a product or service.
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a conceptual
blueprint that defines the structure and operation of an organization. The
intent of enterprise architecture is
to determine how an organization can most effectively achieve its current and
future objectives. SMACT stack
is a new enterprise IT model that blends social, mobile, data analytics, cloud
technologies and Internet of Things to improve business competitiveness.
A survey from Forbes pointed out the Top 10 CIO concerns as
follows:
- - Technology Alignment with the Business
- - Security & Privacy
- - Speed of IT Delivery and Time-to-Market
- - Innovation
- - Business Productivity & Efficiency
- - IT Value Proposition to the Business
- - IT Agility & Flexibility
- - IT Cost Reduction & Controls
- - Business Agility & Flexibility
- - Business Cost Reduction & Controls
With close to 15+ years in my consulting tenure practicing
Lean Six Sigma with Enterprise Architecture now embracing next generation
digital wave of SMAC IoT here are top 3 things an enterprise should switch to or
start thinking to address the above concerns:
1.
Think
First … Think Fast… Think Future
-
The ever changing landscape of business and
technology poses a challenge for any big or small enterprise to catch up with
the speed and scale, its very crucial for the technologist to play a vital
consulting role in alignment with business and management in clearly defining
the roadmap of the future. Here is where the role of an enterprise architect
becomes important to align the Big 7 areas (MDM, BPM, ECM, IDM, UXM, BI and
Middleware) clearly mapping the big 5 architecture components : Business
Architecture, Information Architecture, Integration Architecture, Data
Architecture and Application architecture leveraging the latest digital technology
stack Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud and Internet of Things
2.
Lean
Before Digitize
-
Lean Leader becomes an integral part of the
core team who will define the areas to go Lean and help Specify value from the
standpoint of the end customer by product family, clearly eliminate non value
add and perhaps automate and orchestrate value enabling activities. As flow is
introduced, let customers pull value from the next upstream activity and aim at
creating perfection in all the areas. An enterprise architect wearing a lean
cap will play a very crucial role at all levels of architecture ensuring
agility, flexibility, scalability and reusability with least efforts and almost
zero rework keeping in mind the pace of technology change. Lean and Six Sigma
are proven frameworks of excellence and cost optimization as a result of
improved operations / decisions impacting business productivity and
efficiency
3.
Empower…
Engage… Energize
-
The people factor will play an equally crucial
role in the millennial era, the employees need to see value in what they are
doing if not what will be left over in the organization will be those who will
end up dreaming the future unable to execute, many a organizations have not matured
to the modern day thinking, the HR policies and the complacency mind-set equating
presence with performance and no moonlighting will kill innovation. What is
required is to enable the talent in the organization to stand on their own feet
and think like entrepreneurs, empower with strong HR policies which energies
the employees to engage in the next gen digital wave and contribute towards the
organization growth. Get away from reporting employee utilization by measuring 9 to 6 stay and work in office /
timesheet entries and feel proud that your utilization is increased and for
haven sake stop force fitting your talent into the bell curve … this will force
employees not to take risk fearing missing the goals and objective.
For every organization to be successful remember all three areas
People, Process and Technology are extremely important, the next generation
digital wave marked with the SMACT stack will need skills that are not coming
out from the education factory (Engineering and Tech. institutes) hold your
best talent… groom them to see the future and get ready for the future…
Lean Six Sigma philosophy applied with Enterprise
Architecture Frameworks in the SMACT area and harnessing the talent to its
fullest potential with right policy governance is a mantra of the millennial
organization that foresees itself to stay competitive in this market …
