Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Guest was Steve Bell

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Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell

Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems For more than twenty five years, Steve Steve Bell, the founder of Lean IT Strategies LLC. Steve is a Lean Enterprise Institute faculty member, Shingo Research Prize winning author, and Lean IT pioneer. Steve has delivered a balance of Lean, business process improvement, and management consulting services.

Steve published Lean Enterprise Systems: Using IT for Continuous Improvement helping to introduce the emerging discipline of Lean IT. Steve and his partner Mike Orzen later published Lean IT: Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation.

Steve is on of the keynotes at the upcoming, North American Lean IT Summit, bringing together a community of Lean and agile practitioners and thought leaders from around the globe.

The Podcast Transcription: Joe Dager: Welcome, everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of the Business901 podcast.

With me today is Steve Bell. He is the founder of Lean IT Strategies, a management consulting firm focused on helping his clients deliver value through continuous improvement and innovation of IT products, projects, and services. Steve is also the author of "Lean Enterprise System," the first book to explore the emerging disciplines of Lean IT. Steve is also a co-author of "Lean IT: Enabling and Sustaining your Lean Transformation," which was a Shingo Prize recipient. Steve, I would like to welcome you.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems And trying to catch up with you to schedule the podcast, it would seem the Lean IT world is extremely busy at the moment.

Steve Bell: It is very busy, Joe. I appreciate you having me on the show. Suddenly, in the last few years, there's been an awful lot of attention turned to IT and the IT capabilities, driving strategy and helping companies connect with their customers.

Joe: Lean IT touches so many areas. To steal a GE term, the information world seems to be boundaryless. Can you briefly describe what you consider Lean IT? Steve: In my previous book, Joe, "Lean IT," I described the inward and outward-facing dimensions of Lean IT. The inward-facing dimension is primarily operational excellence of the IT organization itself. That really falls in three categories: one, the provision of IT services, such as servers, storage, security and such, to help the business run; application development, where I focused on the agile software development, which is the rapid learning and delivery of innovative software applications; and then Lean project management, because oftentimes the IT organization is tasked with being the project-management center of expertise for the organization. So what the inward-facing dimension of Lean IT does is help the IT organization achieve operational excellence to serve the enterprise, because after all, in most cases, IT is a support organization of the enterprise.

That brings us to the outward-facing dimension, which is the real purpose of the business, which is to add value to its customers. In that role, IT can help provide applications, self-serviced applications, to engage the customer-particularly nowadays, we're seeing many, many mobile applications-helping customers interact with the company directly, as Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems well as IT capabilities that are being built into practically every product and service an enterprise delivers to its customers these days. IT capabilities have really become integral to the way an organization interacts with the customer to improve the customer experience.

Joe: I think I read somewhere, that 60 percent of products now have a smart feature to it. So, really, information technology affects 60-70 percent of the products, let alone the internal working.

Steve: That's true. In addition, even those products that don't have a technology capability built in, many savvy companies are now finding ways, through websites and mobile interfaces and self-service customer interfaces, to help the customer find and purchase and use their products and services more effectively. In some cases, it's the service aspect through the Internet that will often differentiate a company's product or service more than the product itself.

Joe: I think that goes back to something I talk about a lot, Service-Dominant LogicTM, where your product or service has little value; it's enabling the use of it. I think that IT plays a huge role in enabling the use of the product, from what you just said there?

Steve: Exactly, exactly. In fact, there are some very forward-looking companies that are starting to explore the boundaries of social media, beyond the personal aspects of social media, what we might be commonly seeing as Facebook or Twitter. We're starting to look at how we can monitor sentiments, how we can monitor communications that are going out across the Internet, what are people saying about our products, what are people saying about our competitors' products. Through the volumes of data that are now passing Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems across the Internet every second, much of it publicly accessible, what can we gather about customer and prospect behaviors, both considering a particular product or how they're using a particular product, more and more nowadays, these technology-enabled products that you're speaking of, Joe--say a refrigerator, for example. The more that refrigerators and power meters and other devices are hooked to the grid, are hooked to the Internet, we'll be able to begin monitoring usage patterns and not only provide higher-value products and services to our customers, but we'll be able to monitor how our customers are actually using these products and, in doing so, gain insights into how to help them add more value in the future through creative product design.

Joe: Why does Lean IT matter? Do I want to Lean IT? How does Lean and IT work together?

Steve: It's interesting. If you're a very large traditional company and you're looking at many of the web upstarts--say, for example, you might look at an Amazon or you might look at a Google--and you say, "Well, how are these companies able to move so quickly and disrupt so many markets?" Well, the answer is that these companies, these new web upstarts, are very creative, they're very fast-moving, they're very innovative, and they’re often well-funded. They often don't have a lot of baggage. What most large traditional enterprises have is a great deal of baggage, much of it in terms of old, outdated processors, but also much of it in terms of old and outdated legacy systems and legacy architecture. So one of the first things Lean IT does is to look inside the organization and its processes and its information systems and look for waste. The common wastes within Lean definitely have their metaphors within the Lean IT world, such as excess applications Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems and bad data and redundancy and so forth, and there's an awful lot of that within the world of IT. If you look at how many larger organizations spend their money on IT, they will tell you that upwards of 70, 80, even 90 percent in some cases, are spent just on keeping the lights on, keeping the servers running and keeping the applications humming. If you're spending 80 percent on keeping the lights on, that only leaves 20 percent of your IT budget on an annual basis to fund growth and innovation. When you're competing with many of these very agile, very fast web startups that are trying to disrupt your industry, many CIOs in many larger organizations are now looking to see what they can do to promote innovation, to speed the innovative edge that IT can offer them.

You don't do this by cutting costs or cutting heads, or oftentimes outsourcing services.

What you do is the same approach you would do in any other industry, where you apply Lean. You get your teams of people together. You map out your value streams. You figure out where the waste is. And then, incrementally, you remove that waste, and what you end up achieving is a degree of operational excellence on the operations side of IT, which frees up the creativity to drive the growth and innovation for the company, which is what the people in the C-suite want for IT. Joe: IT is very knowledge-based. Is that easy to map? Can you lay out that current state and build a future state easily, or is it pretty difficult?

Steve: That's a very insightful question. There are really two dimensions of Lean IT. I'm not talking the outward and the inward-facing; I'm talking about in relationship to knowledge. There's a metaphor that goes back to the production world, the manufacturing Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems world. When we talk about Lean, we typically, in our minds, have Lean manufacturing or Lean production in our heads, which is about operational excellence and which is about efficiency. There's another very important aspect of Lean, and that is Lean product development. In the world of manufacturing, Toyota, for example, has a very well-refined product-development organization, many others as well. I could point to 3M and Google and others that are very innovative organizations. They practice Lean principles as well, but the focus isn't so much on operational excellence and efficiency as creating rapid cycles of learning and discovery.

That's the real key, when you talk about IT and the world of innovation, when you try to have IT drive innovation, is you're directly trying to find the areas of uncertainty. You're looking for the mysteries. You're looking for the unknowns. Which is why there's such a thriving venture-capital market in the Silicon Valley, for example, because you've got that whole region of the country focused on asking new questions and uncovering those uncertainties and driving new products and services and even business models.

The question for many traditional IT organizations is, how do we take what is typically a fairly risk-averse organization--the typical IT organization has very strict budgeting and governance mechanisms to manage risk and to manage project costs and all of that--and how do we maintain the safety and the security of our IT operations while, at the same time, encouraging and promoting innovation? This means taking risks, taking calculated risks.

The part of Lean IT that the agile software development world has tapped into so successfully over the last 10 or 20 years is how to apply those Lean principles in the area Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems of development. Now, overall, Lean IT has to bring the development and the operations people together, because it's not sufficient just to write and deploy a new, innovative application. You actually have to deliver it to the customers, and they actually have to adopt it and use it successfully.

You really have to look at it as an entire value stream, from the time someone has an idea until the time that idea's actually deployed and measurably adding value in the field. It's that cycle of learning and development. The faster you can make that cycle of development and learning, the more innovative you can be.

Joe: To me, that seems like the cool side, the design side, the innovation side. 80 percent of it, maybe as much, is the standard work, The regular work that IT does. Is that a good way to put it, the standard work?

Steve: Well, exactly. There has been so much emphasis in the last few years on cloud computing and service-oriented architecture and outsourcing, and what companies are trying to do are gain scale efficiencies on the operational side of IT. These are the highly engineered activities that can and should be standardized. And this is the area where the IT services management community has been focused for so many years, in the IT Infrastructure Library, the ITIL, certification, the framework for operations of IT. And the basic framework is, how do you manage IT operations to drive out variations, drive out risk, to improve quality, reliability, and consistency? What I see many companies do, however, is that same thing that many manufacturing companies tried to do years ago, which is thinking that we can reduce our risk and improve our quality and reduce our cost by outsourcing these things. Many manufacturers outsourced some basic capabilities to Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Asia and to Latin America over the past few decades. Now we're learning that in many cases, since we were not looking at total cost of ownership, we weren't looking at the total package of services and cycle time, turnaround time, that there were many hidden costs and there were many detriments to the long term health of our enterprise by farming out some of these core capabilities. Now we're starting to see the on-shoring trend turning around in the manufacturing world.

I predict that we'll see this same sort of trend in IT because, basically, even if you can make an economic argument to outsource basic infrastructure or basic IT services the first thing you need to do is clean up your house. Standardize your services, catalog your services, figure out what it is you're doing and how because if you hand an outsourcer a non-standard process that's not running well and not documented well you will pay for them to sort it out and you will most likely end up with their best practices rather than your own. In the long run, that may not be in your enterprises best interest.

So the focus on standard work in the Lean world is to get your teams together, define the work, document it, and do it consistently, over and over again.

Joe: Does it help to be practicing Lean in other areas to start practicing Lean IT? Steve: That's an interesting question. I have a new book coming out here in just a few months. Dan Jones who was co-author with Jim Womack of "Lean Thinking" and a couple of other books really has helped define the practice of Lean. He's the forward author for this new book of mine. Dan and I spent quite a bit of time talking about Lean in the context not just of IT but in the context of other industries. What Dan had to say about this was fascinating. He said he's seen, over the last 20 years or so, Lean has moved well Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems beyond manufacturing. It's moved into healthcare and financial services and transportation and retail and distribution. Every time Lean moves into a new area, a new domain, a new industry sector, it manifests slightly differently. The Lean you would see in a hospital looks different in many ways than the Lean you would see in a manufacturing floor or a retail environment.

But when you get right down to it the principles of Lean are the same. It's about collaborative learning. It's about speed. It's about quality. It's about waste reduction.

Those basic principles are the same.

What he has concluded and what I have concluded is you need to create a framework for the people who are actually doing the work to come together, figure out what the work is to be done. Where's the value? Where's the waste? Iteratively, through experiments, find ways to do it better and better. Each time you learn. You go through a cycle of learning.

You improve the process and at the same time you understand more about the subtleties about the process and that's where the paradox of Lean emerges. As you're standardizing something you're also gaining insights into it which leads to creativity and innovation.

Many people react to standard work thinking that you're just turning people into robots.

What you're actually doing is you're helping people, removing the drudgery and the repetitiveness from the work, making the work flow more smoothly and quickly, which frees up peoples valuable time and energy to figure out ways to do the work better and to do new kinds of work.

I think that's the real magic of Lean whether it's in IT or any other industry. When you see a team really get it and start to think and act like a team with a focus on the customer and Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems they own the product, they own the process, they own their relationship with the customer, then the role of management isn't so much a directive role or a controlling role but the role of management is to help remove the obstacles in the teams way. That's when you have high performance, self-directing teams that really start to energize the company.

When that happens that's where the momentum comes from.

Joe: You mentioned a couple of things there. It doesn't sound like it's just about the internal customer it's also about how the organization affects the external customer. With social media and everything, how does that affect IT departments out there? That's got to be tough from a security standpoint.

Steve: It certainly is disruptive. If you look at several of the very major disruptive trends that enterprise IT organizations have had to learn to grapple with just in the last five years that would include not just the emergence but the rapid adoption of cloud computing, the emergence of social media, the emergence of big data analysis. Suddenly, just in the last year, the statistics show that the usage of mobile computing is now in many cases, browsing on mobile devices has exceeded browsing on ordinary web browsers. So mobility has taken off like a rocket-ship.

What that means is that no matter what your business, no matter who your customer is, you can count on them being better informed than you. When the time comes when someone is in the field ready to make a purchase decision, or use your product or service, or needs help using your product or service, being able to connect with them in real time through various channels, not just email, not just instant messaging, not just chat, but starting to use some of these other systems of engagement, from an enterprise point of Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems view, to help improve the customer experience is where we feel a lot of companies investing a lot of effort in research and development right now. Not that they're there but that they know that this is important for them to experiment with because whoever gets the high ground of an improved customer experience is going to attract this whole new market.

What does that do for enterprise IT in terms of security, in terms of storage management, in terms of integrating these little 99 cent apps with SAP on the back end? Well, that's a challenge. That's part of where the agility of Lean IT, not just on the application development and application integration and business intelligence but the overall architecture, the overall integration end to end and all the way down the technology stack, all the way down to servers and storage and security, really the whole IT organization needs to be agile and responsive.

That's where I see the direction of Lean IT going. It's taking a lot of the lessons that the agile software development community has learned over the years and applying it to the larger scale value streams of the overall enterprise, not only the technology value streams all the way down the technology stack but the enterprise-wide value streams that actually do touch the end customer.

I believe we all see now that in many cases competitive advantage, despite what Nick Carr might have said years ago with his book "Does IT Matter?". It does matter. It matters in the hands of the consumers who are looking to have a fast, base, and satisfying customer experience as they interface with us and they use our products and services.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joe: Can you be real loosey-goosey in one area, let's say, and then very controlled in another? Is it possible for IT to think that way?

Steve: That's an interesting question. I'll have to reflect on that for a minute. The pace of change is very rapid right now. Not a month goes by, I think, that every one of us doesn't see or hear of some new product or service or company and suddenly you raise an eyebrow and you say "Wow, I never thought of that before." The next thing you know you've downloaded it and you're using it and you expect it to work. You expect it to work flawlessly. I think one of the most significant things that have happened to us in the last five years is our threshold for adoption is virtually instantaneous. That's when we talked about the consumerization of IT. That's what we mean.

Can we expect that something that we can download in five minutes for 99 cents on our iPad to actually work and integrate with the back end of the enterprise and be a part of the flow of those enterprise-wide processes right away? I think that is an unrealistic expectation. But at the same time, enterprise IT organizations need to find a better balance of security and control and integration to be able to do that.

I can tell you right now that there are some real challenges out there. It's not that enterprise IT folks aren't trying, it's just that many of these architectures and these integration infrastructures that have been put in place surrounding some of these legacy systems for the last 10 or 20 years are really being stretched, they're really being pushed.

I think we're looking, over the next 10 or 20 years, at a transition. Technology futurist Geoffrey Moore talks about the transition from transactional systems, systems like ERP systems, the systems of engagement, and he says it's going to take a decade for Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems organizations who's whole businesses are on ERP systems, like SAP and Oracle and others, to truly integrate these social media and social engagement tools smoothly into the flow of the work that we do. But I do believe that's the direction that we're going.

To answer your question, it's going to be a very fine balance and a constantly shifting balance between control and flexibility.

Joe: Is that one of the reasons that nobody likes the IT department? "Oh, I've got to get IT involved."

Steve: Well, you know, that's a really good point. Just in the last two years I've heard many people say that now my IT at home, my Sunday night IT, is much better than my Monday morning IT. I've got a newer computer. I've got a faster connection. I don't have so many restrictions. I can get more work done at home on Sunday night than when I go into work on Monday morning. I think that's partly because of the shifts that the consumeration of technology. We do have access to better, faster, cheaper, easier to use technologies from a consumer perspective than we do from a business perspective.

I'm going to put my Lean thinking cap on and encourage people to remember that from a Lean perspective sub-optimization does not always add value to the customer. What I mean by that is that any particular person can do their task or has a more satisfying individual experience with you and your computer and your smartphone but if you are creating hurdles you are creating additional fragmentation of systems and data and the flow of that information that's supports the flow of the work across the entire value stream that adds value to the end customer. You may feel like you're getting a better experience Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems but you're actually throwing up additional roadblocks in the delivery of value to the end customer.

I'm not saying the consumerization of IT is a good thing or a bad thing but I think we need to keep our Lean hats on and look at the overall value stream and focus on the flow of the overall value stream. I think from an enterprise perspective, that's most important.

Joe: I think you hit a nail on the head because I got a whole slew of software and now I got a whole slew of apps on my phone that all were meant to solve my latest problem but it's amazing how little of the problems our relevant a month later or if I'm still using them.

Steve: Exactly.

Joe: If you looked at that from an organizational perspective I would think that it would create such an extraordinary amount of waste and confusion that you could practically become dysfunctional.

Steve: Yes. Absolutely. I know many of your listeners are familiar with value stream mapping but oftentimes there's a bias to focus on the processes, the cycle time and the elapsed time and the quality of the processes and so forth. I like to spend an equal amount of time, once I've mapped the processes out, to look at the underlying information systems. When you map the information systems out and how they support the process, often you'll find twice as many information systems, anywhere from databases and spreadsheets, and even the little sticky notes on a person's monitor, in one way of thinking, is an information system, because it provides information to facilitate the flow of the process. You map those information systems out on a value stream map, you'll see Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems enormous anarchy, enormous, chaotic flow of information, with gaps and cracks and hand-offs, where three people are involved in the same process and everyone has information that disagrees with the others.

That sort of fragmentation, from an information point of view, is not helping the flow of work. It may seem like its helping each individual do their task, but in the end, it's cluttering up the flow of work. The only way to see that, the only way to identify that waste is to get all of the stakeholders of the whole value stream in a room together and figure it out. The moment you do, it's been my experience most of the time, anyhow, that every individual sort of loosens their grip on their own individual productivity-enhancement tools in favor of improving the flow of the overall process. But you have to bring the team together and get that insight if that's going to happen.

Joe: I think that's a huge factor, because I can see that, especially from my experience in sales and marketing, when you sit there and take a value stream of a customer and you look at a customer-journey map, per se, and then you look at the processes behind that.

You go backstage. We can all identify the audience. From a theater perspective, you can identify the audience and the on-stage performances, the sales and stuff. When you go backstage how that salesman is supported there's huge gaps there.

Steve: Absolutely. Absolutely. I made a presentation about three weeks ago at the annual Lean Enterprise Institute's Transformation Summit in Florida, and the subject of my talk was the virtual voice of the customer, and the emphasis of that presentation was on the customer experience. A point I made during the presentation was, how often do you really go together? How often do you really go to the customer, watch how the customer Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems interacts with you? When they put a call into your service desk or your help desk, how many times do they have to call back? How many times do they have to leave a message?

How many times do they have to tell the same story, over and over and over again, for example? Do you even know your customers have to go through that? From your point of view, you may not see what it's like to be someone who is doing business with you. So you've got to get up, you've got to go out there and make an active effort to walk a mile in their shoes, as the old saying goes, and understand what the customer experience is in doing business with you. When you do that, it's not easy. It takes time. It takes effort. But when you truly walk a mile in your customer's shoes that is where the insights come.

That's where the creativity and the ideas come in, saying, "Boy, if we could only do this, if we could only make it easier for the customer to do this?"

Those are the things that matter to your customers. When they know you're listening, when they know you're paying attention to the little things that matter, that's when loyalty occurs. And a lot of these things that we're talking about making life easier for the customer to do business with you, in this day and age, a lot of them have to do with some sort of a technology experience, on a mobile phone or a browser or even just an automated voice-response system on a computer that's talking to a back-end database somewhere. The customer experience is very much, these days, a technology experience.

Joe: I think you have a great point. Is there a way I can listen to that presentation? Was that recorded?

Steve: Well, if you would go to Lean Enterprise Institute, www.Lean.org, and I believe that those videos are there. I believe there's a fee to sign up, but you can have access to Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems all of the videos from all of the presentations from the summit. It was a great summit. I'm sorry I don't know what the fee is, but I would say it would be well worth it, especially if someone from a company were to sign up and have multiple viewings of it. I think there would be a lot of value in that.

Joe: There seems to be so much intangible value surrounding IT. How do you measure?

How do you know your IT department's doing a good job?

Steve: Oh, goodness. That is the million-dollar question. The traditional measures of IT, particularly on the operations side, such as uptime and server response time and things like that, having to do with the mechanics of deploying IT; they're important from an operational point of view, in order to ensure that you're delivering those services consistently, high quality, reliability, low cost. But the real key to measuring IT value is, "are you enabling the business to do business better, faster, more friendly with the customer?" Ultimately, when you're deploying technologies into the field, self-service applications or mobile applications or online order-entry applications, what are you doing to help improve the customer experience, to make you an easier, better, faster, cheaper company to do business with? If you can tie those measures of business outcomes back, at least indirectly, to the activity of the IT organization, then you're really getting somewhere.

Now, the only way you can do that is when the folks in the IT organization are on the same value stream teams as the businesspeople who are delivering value to the customers.

I often like to ask this question. When is the last time you had a Kaizen, a continuous-improvement event, in your business, and you had an IT person, a person from the IT organization, in that Kaizen event from start to finish? You didn't just bring them in Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems at the end and hand them the, quote, "solution," whatever it is they're supposed to deliver to you. You had them there from the very beginning, from problem identification, problem-solving, so you could gain their understanding and their insights of what are technologies or what are challenges that the businesspeople may not have a sense for, that the IT folks, if they were in that room from the very start, you could have a whole new set of insights into the problem-solving process.

Most often people will say, "Well, our IT folks are too busy. They're too busy fixing things.

They're too busy responding or reacting to things." I would say one of the very best measures, one of the very best leading indicators of IT performance, is how much of IT's time is spent in proactive versus reactive behavior? How much of their daily activity is planned versus unplanned? Because I believe the more you can engage IT in helping run the business better, the less reactive, firefighting behavior you'll see out of the IT organization. That's when the real creativity and the innovation kicks in.

But in order to free up their time, in order to do that, the first thing you've got to do is they've got to clean up their own backyard. And that's where the operational-excellence aspect of IT comes in, where you're focused on reliability, consistency, quality, performance.

Joe: There's a conference that you're a big part of, in September, I believe. When is that, and what would I learn by attending it?

Steve: First-annual Lean IT Summit. It is happening in Orlando, September 10th and 11th, and then I'll actually be presenting a full-day Lean IT workshop on the 12th. And then the 13th and 14th, at the same venue, is the Lean Accounting Summit, put on by the Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems same organizers. So my workshop is actually sandwiched between the Lean IT Summit and the Lean Accounting Summit, and I believe there's quite a bit of crossover between those two audiences. Lean Enterprise Institute is the sponsor of this event. It is going to have a great lineup of speakers. You could go on the web to Leanitsummit.com. The keynoter, kicking off the first day, is Mike Rother. Rother and Shook wrote "Learning to See" years ago. Mike has written a book that has resonated very strongly with the IT community, called "Toyota Kata," which I really think had a lot of lessons for Lean and IT. We've got several other keynotes. One in particular I want to mention is Mark Striebeck, who is a chief engineer at Google. He's the product owner for the whole Gmail product at Google, and he'll have some very interesting insights about Lean principles and practices that are just baked into the DNA at Google. We're going to have folks from the agile software community and the IT services management community and IT architecture, and it's going to be a fabulous two-day overview of all of the participants in the IT community and what they have to do with Lean.

Joe: Your new book will be out just about that time, too. You'll introduce that at your workshop?

Steve: Absolutely. In fact, right now it's slated to ship about the time of the workshop. My newest book, my third book, the name of it is "Run, Grow, Transform: Integrating Business and Lean IT." And basically, the emphasis of this book is how we improve IT operational excellence so we can shift more of our effort and our investment into things that help the business grow and help the business innovate. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I am very fortunate to have had Dan Jones collaborate with me on this and write a foreword for the Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems book. I also have a number of co-authors, who have each helped me with the content of this book and have contributed their own chapters. What I basically have done is, with this book, I establish the premise that there is no such thing as IT. IT isn't an entity. IT is really a community. It is a community of practitioners with various disciplines.

What I've brought together are thought leaders, representing many of these disciplines, together, to look at IT as an integrated whole. Let me just go down the list: Charles Betz, enterprise architect, author; Troy DuMoulin, from the IT services-management community, also an author; Paul Harmon and Sandra Foster, from the business process management community; Mary Poppendieck, a well-known thought leader in the agile software development community; and John Schmidt, who is an author of a book called "Lean Integration" and an expert in Lean data management and integration.

Each of these has not only helped me thread together my own material and my own chapters, but each of them has also contributed a chapter in their own area of expertise.

What I've hoped to accomplish with this book is to treat IT as a community of practitioners, and a community of practitioners that has to join hands with the business colleagues that they work hand-in-hand with, in order to create the IT-enabled value streams that add value to the end customer. After all, that's the whole point, that is the reason an enterprise exists.

Joe: That's scary. I recognize all the names.

Steve: It's a great lineup, and I am so grateful to have all of their effort and their participation.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joe: Steve, if someone would like to get a hold of you, what's the best way?

Steve: Well, the best way to reach me would be through my website, which is www.Leanitstrategies.com. I also invite you to visit me on my LinkedIn site: you can find me with Lean IT Strategies through Steve Bell. And I'm on Twitter at @LeanITCoach.

Joe: I'd like to thank you very much. It was a very insightful conversation. The podcast will be available on the Business901 website and also the Business901 iTunes store. So thanks again, Steve.

Steve: Thank you for having me, Joe.

Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription

Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joseph T. Dager Implementer of Lean Marketing Systems Ph: 260-438-0411 Fax: 260-818-2022 Email: jtdager@business901.com Web/Blog: http://www.business901.com Twitter: @business901 What others say: In the past 20 years, Joe and I have collaborated on many difficult issues. Joe's ability to combine his expertise with "out of the box" thinking is unsurpassed. He has always delivered quickly, cost effectively and with ingenuity. A brilliant mind that is always a pleasure to work with." James R. Joe Dager is President of Business901, a progressive company providing direction in areas such as Lean Marketing, Product Marketing, Product Launches and Re-Launches. As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, Business901 provides and implements marketing, project and performance planning methodologies in small businesses. The simplicity of a single flexible model will create clarity for your staff and as a result better execution. My goal is to allow you spend your time on the need versus the plan.

An example of how we may work: Business901 could start with a consulting style utilizing an individual from your organization or a virtual assistance that is well versed in our principles. We have capabilities to plug virtually any marketing function into your process immediately. As proficiencies develop, Business901 moves into a coach’s role supporting the process as needed. The goal of implementing a system is that the processes will become a habit and not an event.

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Podcast Opportunity Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell Copyright Business901

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