Now more than ever, IT competency is essential to business success. The ability of your IT organization to rapidly respond to the needs of customers, changing technology, security threats, mobility, big data and speed to market while simultaneously maintaining stability and resilience of current systems is a daunting challenge. The good news is there is a proven path to deliver. By leveraging core concepts, systems, and practices from 4 key disciplines, IT can successfully fulfill the needs of your business while continuing to grow its capabilities and retain talent. When technology is focused on outcomes, services and products it becomes an ally and key partner with the business by delivering value to the customer.
Lean IT is the application of lean manufacturing principles applied to the development and operation of information technology products and services. Its central focus is the creation of flow of IT value to enable the organization to meet the needs of its customers. Flow is created by 1) elimination of work that adds no value, 2) reducing variation and unnecessary complexity and 3) addressing overburden of people and teams.
Agile is a software development methodology based on iterative development, where requirements and resolutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. Agile is based on the core principles of lean and primarily focuses on software development. It is also applied as a project management methodology. Scrum and Kanban are the most common agile practices.
DevOps is a combination of cultural philosophies, practices and tools that combine software development with IT operations. The goal of DevOps is to shorten the systems development life cycle while delivering features, fixes, and updates frequently in close alignment with business objectives. The approach stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers, infrastructure engineers, IT operations, QA, security and (most importantly) the business.
Service Management is all the activities, policies, processes and procedures performed to design, plan, deliver, operate and control information technology services. Integrated service management merges the best of Lean, Agile, DevOps and Service Management to provide the most complete roadmap towards operational excellence in IT.