By Michael Christenson

Lean IT — the application of Lean manufacturing principles to IT — can help CIOs eliminate IT inefficiencies, increase productivity, control costs, and improve service quality and customer service. CIOs who apply Lean thinking to IT can maximize the value their department delivers to both the business and its customers.

Looking to get started? Here are some practical tips to help ensure that your Lean IT efforts deliver results that will please your CEO, your CFO and, perhaps most important, your customers:

Focus on Quick Incremental Wins.
When starting with Lean IT, consider small projects that can help lower costs and yield quick results. Identify one or two essential IT processes where inefficiencies exist, and focus on reducing waste and cycle time there.

One such area is server provisioning. In a recent Benefits of Practical Innovation survey, conducted by Smart Enterprise magazine and IDG Research Services, 45 percent of CIOs said their server-provisioning processes could use improvement. One of our customers, a financial services company, used to take 34 days to provision just one new server. Our sales and services teams worked with the company to implement process improvements and automation that reduced the process to just six days. This improvement saves the company more than $12,000 each time it provisions a new server.

Focus on the Customer Experience.
Increasingly, customers interact with companies through the Web and online applications. And across nearly every industry, a great deal of revenue is driven today by electronic transactions. CIOs can enhance this by applying Lean IT practices, which aim to maximize the value delivered to customers — and to ensure that customers have a positive online experience when they engage with your company.

In the Practical Innovation survey, nearly 85 percent of senior IT executives said that improving their customers' experiences with business-critical or revenue-driving applications would yield a major business benefit. In this issue's cover story, you can learn how we've helped software provider Intuit Inc. ensure that its customers have a positive experience.

Focus Your Resources to Maximize Value.
In this economy, no company can afford to spend precious IT resources on projects that fail to yield sufficient business benefits. More than likely, the challenge you face is one of prioritization. Since the constituencies you serve have no shortage of ideas for how they'd like IT to support their initiatives, how do you pick the ones likely to deliver the greatest business benefit?

You're not alone. In the Practical Innovation survey, nearly 75 percent of senior IT executives said their IT investment processes could stand improvement. Project and portfolio management (PPM) solutions can provide CIOs with insight into how well various projects align with organizational objectives, leading to informed, fact-based investment prioritization discussions. PPM solutions can also help CIOs ensure that, once resources are assigned, the intended projects are delivered on time, on budget and on track to deliver the expected results.

These three approaches can help you apply Lean practices — and start enjoying the benefits — today.

Michael Christenson is CA's President and COO.