ABSTRACT
Lean is a change management tool. It was developed by Toyota over 40 years ago to help them standardize on a methodology for continuous improvement. Since then Lean has evolved through numerous iterations, primarily in the United States where everything needs to be Americanized. Lean is both a management philosophy and a change methodology. Its management philosophy stresses the elimination of waste. Utilizing Lean principles provides an information technology (IT) environment that is more efficient and more responsive to the customer, and therefore more competitive overall. Lean adapts itself easily to the world-class Capability Maturity Models (CMM) so commonly used in IT to define world-class status. Lean drives an organization toward the world-class characteristics of the CMM and simultaneously accelerates their implementation and integration throughout the IT organization. Lean’s capability to improve organizations can also be applied to a company’s IT organization to reduce its own wastes and drive its own efficiencies.
