(Q) You've written white papers and offered seminars about the opportunity to magnify the benefits of continuous process improvement initiatives such as Six Sigma and Lean with the aid of BPM. Can you start by describing where Six Sigma and Lean have come up short?

(A) As a rule, the Six Sigma practitioner is an industrial engineer, a mechanical engineer or maybe a business person. They are not IT people, they may not understand IT, and furthermore, when they've looked for data and measurement around processes, they haven't had a lot of success getting it out of IT. The IT department has generally asked them to take a number and get in line because they have had other priorities.

As a result, Six Sigma and Lean practitioners typically collect information on their own and then they measure it, analyze it and design and implement improvements outside of enterprise IT, which means several things. Number one, there's a lot of redundant gathering of information and a lot of problems calibrating the data sources. As a result, they're spending way too much time in the measurement phase. Secondly, when these continuous process improvement efforts get back to the control phase, there's no closed loop. Six Sigma and Lean teams tell people what to do to optimize a process, but it's like herding cats [because there are no measures or control mechanisms in place].

Finally, Six Sigma and Lean initiatives have tended to affect human-centric systems, but not the system behind the iron curtain of IT. In the early years of a Six Sigma or Lean initiative you could make a lot of hay just fixing human-centric problems without ever touching IT, but the next-highest level of low-hanging fruit involves enterprise IT.

By Doug Henschen
3:16:47 PM  
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