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By Leon Erlanger

Acuity Brands Lighting, an Atlanta, Ga., maker of commercial lighting fixtures, relies on e-commerce software developed in-house to help boost its competitive advantage. But Pat Quinn, Senior VP of Information Systems and Technology, couldn’t help noticing that the company’s software development efforts were not always successful. “Each project manager followed his own process,” Quinn says. “Sometimes the results were good, and sometimes they weren’t. To get better results, we needed to standardize and improve our development process.”

Quinn and his colleagues at Acuity Brands turned to Lean, a manufacturing methodology aimed at removing waste and streamlining processes, which was already being used in other parts of the company. When they applied Lean to the company’s software-development processes, the result was a dramatic elimination of waste in both the initial software conception/definition and the later delivery phases of development. As a result, the time needed for key parts of those processes was shortened from weeks and months to mere days.

In so doing, Acuity Brands joins a growing list of companies that have applied Lean manufacturing approaches to IT operations, software development and other aspects of IT. Many CIOs and other IT executives now realize that Lean can be applied to their discipline. The Lean approach has been most successfully applied to those customer-focused business processes, such as order fulfillment, that include a large IT element. But Lean is also being applied successfully to pure IT processes, such as software development, server provisioning and equipping new employees with PCs, desk phones and e-mail.

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Lean IT is one of several developments in a process of industrialization and standardization that has transformed IT departments around the world. “Ten years ago, organizations rarely challenged IT [staff], whom they perceived as wunderkinds speaking another language,” recounts David Hurwitz, a VP of Product Marketing at CA. “But after the [2000-2001] tech bubble burst, senior management started holding IT to the same standards as other parts of the organization.”

This development, in turn, created a need for CIOs to transform and standardize IT. This need became even more urgent as technology worked its way into an increasing number of core business processes, becoming a key component of many organizations’ strategic advantages.

For example, many IT shops have adopted ITIL®, a set of best practices for defining and standardizing IT services. When companies begin to standardize and optimize organizational processes, many look for ways to increase process efficiency and eliminate waste. Enter Lean IT, whose goal is to eliminate any process step that doesn’t benefit the customer directly. “Lean is simply a matter of listening to the people involved in the process,” says Paul Coby, CIO of British Airways, “and then applying common sense.”

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