Steve Bell: Lean IT and Data Quality

Though many Lean practitioners prefer to avoid the entanglements of information systems during a Lean transformation, it’s hard to conceive of how an enterprise could successfully and sustainably transform themselves without addressing the lifeblood of business processes, information. According to Rother and Shook in Learning to See, “Material and information flow are two sides of the same coin. You must map both of them.” While primary focus of Lean should be on improvement of the processes themselves, the quality of the underlying data is a physical and logical manifestation of the condition of the process. Just like Toyota says that the shop floor is a reflection of management, in information-intensive industries (health care, banking, and so on) the flow of work is often represented by transactions stored in one or several databases – plus a myriad of disconnected spreadsheets and other data sources. What can we learn from this, and how can it guide our improvement efforts? Listen to Steve Bell, co-author of the recently released new book “Lean IT – Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation” explore the implications of data quality to the overall Lean Transformation.