The success of Lean manufacturing techniques in the industrial world has increasingly led to their application in other areas of the business, and the IT department looks like it may be the next objective for lean proponents. Increasing buzz level over Lean IT has been bubbling up for the past few months, much of it coming out of Forrester research, and their latest offering, "Lean: The New Business Technology Imperative" puts some legs under a major push behind the methodology.

I've put a post up with more complete coverage of the Forrester piece on the Agile Operations blog (Lean is not Agile!) but here I want to focus more on the organizational aspects of the "imperative." As the Forrester report points out, Lean is not an approach that can easily be adopted by one department in an organization, and indeed the report seems aimed more at higher executive readership than the CIO. This, then, may be an imperative after all, if the CEO hops on that bandwagon. CIOs may find themselves being pushed to implement Lean whether they think it's a wise concept or not.

The danger in this, which Forrester also points out, is that Lean is all too often implemented with a larger focus on its cost-cutting aspects than other, more important concepts such as customer satisfaction and "pull" orientation toward products and services. Since cost-cutting measures are probably the primary objective for organizations looking at Lean in this economic environment, that danger is even higher. CIOs who have already been asked to cut back to the bone may be put on the spot even further by being asked to demonstrate their "continuous improvement" in trimming budgets even more in the future.

As with most threats, this can also be seen as an opportunity. Lean is actually a methodology which has informed the development of many other methodologies which are more popular in the IT world, including (suprise, surprise) Agile Development. Agile Operations is the IT manager's answer to the developer's AD, and it has been knocking insistently on the door of many an oblivious CIO for months now, even as AD has become a more or less accepted tool in the developer's toolbox. By making your IT department lean before the Lean train comes to your station, you can position yourself to lead the rest of the organization into the approach on your own terms, with demonstrable successes to put on the table, instead of being bludgeoned into someone else's idea of what might make your IT department "lean" enough.