CA Inc has taken up a mantra of Lean IT to sell the benefits of its software to automate and optimise the systems and processes that support business services.
“The recession is driving CA to more accurately reflect what businesses need and Lean IT is a good description of what the outcome of our technology should be” Colin Bannister, VP at CA told us on the day the company announced three enhanced service management products that it said would lower the cost of service change, delivery and support.
“All our software product offerings now deploy with content, repeatable templates and standard methods that help accelerate their time-to-value,” he said.
“Lean IT addresses the need to cut waste and improve productivity levels, but it is all about process improvement and excellent customer experience.”
Fujitsu has long been pushing the notion of Lean IT which derives from work carried out decades ago by Toyota.
It begins with a focus on waste and then develops around Kaizen events. These are intensive affairs aimed at bursts of business process improvement which can then help shape lean transformations.
Toyota installs IT only when the manual process has been improved as much as it can without the technology, and only if the technology is proven and reliable.
Content from our partners
At the infrastructural level of business this suggests a need for IT standardisation and re-use as a means of building in industrial strength processes and repeatability as the drivers of service efficiency.
Like CA, at Fujitsu this has been captured as a series of prefabricated and pre-validated software templates.
The company has developed standard blocks for business applications, databases and the like, which can be loaded off the shelf. Other templates manage virtualisation or provisioning on servers, or will provide links to storage through a switching infrastructure.
CA cites Marc Silvester, CTO Fujitsu Services, who describes these so-called Triole template methods as bringing “discipline to IT services and a capability to engineer out defects and waste prior to service delivery.”
In all CA will bring to market 13 new and enhanced products in its Lean IT oriented Enterprise IT Management suite.
