Leaning Back To The Kindergarten

By Peter O'Neill

I have just come back from our own Business Technology Forum in Chicago where my colleagues presented about the concept of “lean production” to an audience of application development and business process professionals: how the IT industry, including enterprise IT, must now finally address and improve its R&D and production processes, just as other industries have done already.

An elegant enhancement to this story was the invitation to John Swainson, CEO of CA to keynote on this topic. CA has been marketing most of this year under their slogan of “Lean IT” and encouraging IT operations professionals to apply the principle in their shop. They were the primary sponsor of the event as part of their corporate campaign to increase their general visibility as a major IT vendor. As expected, John’s speech was illustrative, informative and a perfect fit within the conference. 

Now I have had to field several inquiries from other vendors who wondered about this conjunction of Forrester talking “lean” and one of our clients using the same vocabulary. It is just that, coincidence. After all, there are not that many words that can be used. My colleagues and I, those of us who talk about IT operations, have certainly been working with CA on their marketing programs but we had no influence at all on the scripting of the BTF. A similar situation arose a few years ago when Forrester started to talk about the journey from IT to BT and HP Software decided to declare their mission as providing business technology optimization.

The concepts of lean are not rocket science, unique and certainly not proprietary. It is a good metaphor for discussing many of the potential process improvements that IT still needs to pursue in all its departments. So I must admit to some surprise when I discovered this forthcoming webinar from a CA competitor.

Session 4: Why Lean IT isn’t Going Anywhere, and What You Can Do About It

I do love to highlight best practices so I thought I would, for completeness, also point you to this practice.  As a marketing professional, I find this approach a little depressing and I am convinced that it will be non-productive. This has nothing to do with anybody disagreeing with Forrester as it is clearly a lame attempt to attack a competitor - something which every marketing 101 textbook advises strictly against. remember, this blog is for vendor strategy professionals, no users, so this discussion is strictly within our community.

Do you disagree with me? Anything I have missed? Feel free to let me know.

 Always keeping you informed!

Peter

Comments

[Tim Hill]

hey Peter,

I noticed on the page now it has:
"Session 4: Why Lean IT is Here to Stay and What You Can Do About It "
https://vts.inxpo.com/scripts/InXpo.nxp?LASCmd=L:0&AI=1&ShowKey=1812&LoginType=0&InitialDisplay=1&ClientBrowser=0&DisplayItem=NULL&LangLocaleID=0#ses4

I could this older post about it though which references your version - quite a backflip...
http://remediesforremedy.com/2009/10/invitation-to-attend-bmc-virtual-conference-2009/