By Mary E. Morrison

Orange is Lean. Orange Business Services, that is. The company, a division of France Telecom that provides telecommunications solutions and services to enterprises, is serious about Lean IT, the practice of delivering better IT performance and more value while spending less. And for a company with more than 20,000 employees and 3,750 multinational customers, such gains can be impressive.

Lean approaches are nothing new for the company. In fact, between 2001 and 2005, its IT staff integrated the IT infrastructures, business processes and application chains of two companies it had acquired — Global One and Equant. More recently, the company moved to an optimized IT model. As part of this process, by 2008 it had outsourced and offshored application development and maintenance. Roughly 60 percent of all IT activity was being performed by outsourcing partners. Combined, the two moves let its 700 IT employees concentrate on projects that create business and customer value.

But Vincent Kelly, CIO of Orange Business Services, realized that many IT processes still needed to be improved. The company's executive team decided to use Lean for performance improvement. This was the starting point for a continuous improvement program driven by Lean principles and aimed at delivering more value to IT users, Kelly says.

At the core of the program is first communicating with internal IT end users to determine what is most important to them, then delivering that value in the most efficient way possible. The program has led to a number of improvements. For instance, using Lean principles, Orange Business Services has become more efficient in handling customer calls, and it has adapted the company's scheduling engine to reduce slack time between dispatches.

The goal now, Kelly says, is global optimization — making the company's IT organization, which supports people in 166 locations across the globe, work better end-to-end. "It is true when people say 'One must not offshore and forget,' " he explains. "When you offshore, you have to work that. You have to focus on ongoing iterative improvements."

In some cases, outsourcing partners work directly with Orange Business Services in the offshore locations, Kelly explains. In others, the outsourcing partner has a small front office that works with the company in Europe, with the rest of the partner's team offshore, mainly India.