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Lean IT - Doing More For Less
| Effective technology delivery can be
the difference between innovative success and stagnation. Taking costs
out of your business can be an extremely difficult balance between bottom line management and market differentiation and strategic health. Eden transforms the way that IT services are innovated and delivered. It frees up budget from already committed legacy systems and radically resets the service deliver bar for your business users and executive teams. Lean IT is more than just reducing cost. It's about make your IT pound go further so you can either maintain service levels in tough times or achieve more for the same spend. Isn't it time you look at getting your IT team lean? Lean IT Overview Three decades ago a revolution began. A radical new approach to the management of business processes started to gain a foothold, first in the manufacturing world and later, much later, across all business types. That revolution has been called many things, but is now widely referred to simply as - 'lean'. The catalyst was the realisation that activity alone meant very little. Up until then, business performance measurement systems were all built on the principle that keeping everyone busy all the time signalled success and profitability. In the manufacturing world, this meant boosting the hourly output of each production unit hour by hour, using economic batch sizes to balance changeover times against the unit's lost production minutes. The manufacturing world soon learned that it is the overall performance of the process that matters - not anyone's individual contribution. The emphasis thus switched to linking the components of the chain more closely so that once a process was started, it followed a smoothly, orderly process until it was complete. It's a bit like knocking down a wall of dominoes - no breaks and no build-ups get in the way and slow things down. The advantages were clear, swift and dramatic. Huge reductions in work in progress freed up large amounts of cash. Identifying and eliminating defects was made much easier: if A made a component for B and then waited for the signal to produce another, B could withhold the signal if the part was defective - and A and B could get together and sort the problem on the spot. Overall productivity soared and defect levels plummeted. Machining and assembly learned these lessons quickly and well. Admin was much slower to catch on. Although stacks of work in progress were seen as wasteful and a sign of problems, in-trays full of paper and desks covered in files were still the norm and viewed as a sign of healthy business activity. An empty in-tray and only one item being worked on were regarded with suspicion. In time, the admin side of manufacturing realised that paper-fuelled processes were no different from those powered by heavy machinery. The same dynamics applied - stacks of paper equals stacks of work-in-progress inventory. That means wasted effort, long lead times, high error rates and cost. The lean message has, at long last, even reached deep into the public sector, with many councils and government departments rolling out lean projects. The Problem with IT Lean projects are centred on the concept of continuous improvement. The people involved in a process are encouraged to get together regularly and work out ways to eliminate waste and improve the process. This is easy to do with manufacturing processes and not too difficult with simple, manual paper-based processes. The problems start when the process involves computer systems and IT. The manufacturing world worked around the problem by ignoring IT altogether and developing physical ways manage the process - for example, telling the next operator when to make another component was often done using a KanBan. A KanBan (Japanese for card) described any physical way of communicating between workstations. People got very inventive. If the next workstation was in another building or on another floor they would connect them up with drainpipes and roll a golf ball down to signal a request for another component to be made. Computer systems did not lend themselves to the new way of thinking. These systems were carefully crafted over many man months or years. Changing them at all was difficult and the idea that you could change them incrementally within a fast-moving, continuous improvement program was simply nonsense. The IT industry tried hard to overcome these limitations. Big-ticket systems providers such as ERP vendors made their systems ever more configurable. The desire to speed up the writing of bespoke systems gave rise to a swathe of rapid application development systems. Microsoft developed .Net and visual studio - designed to significantly speed up the time it took developers to create new applications. None of these, however, came close to meeting the need for continuous improvement of IT systems. The Breakthrough Everything changed when two completely new developments in the IT world emerged. The first, called Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), is a beautifully simple concept. It proposes that systems should be made up of many independent and re-usable elements called services. Each re-usable element, or service, would use the same standard communication method to talk to other services. A good example of a re-usable service is Google Maps, which will provide computer systems with latitude and longitude coordinates on request if presented with a postcode. Companies wishing to create a system for allocating work to mobile engineers need the latitude and longitude of customers' addresses in order to schedule work. Instead of having to write a program to do this, they simply send a request using the agreed communication standard to the relevant Google service and it returns the required coordinates. In theory, with systems being made up of re-usable services, it's possible to change how a process works simply by changing the order in which services operate, replacing individual services or adding new ones - or all three. Good though this development is, it still isn't good enough. Services are still programs and have to be written. To completely solve our problem, we need to stop having to write services. The answer has actually been staring us in the face all the time - and brings us to the second part of the breakthrough. If we can create business systems on the larger scale from re-usable services, then we should also be able to create individual services from even smaller re-usable services. We will call the components used to codelessly build such a service 'micro services'. Composite services perform recognisable user oriented functions like the Google example. Micro services undertake tasks that a programmer would normally have to define and write - such as "Get me data from a table within a database" or 'Display the contents of this field in a given position on a screen" At Datadialogs, we soon realised that any service, however complicated, can be built up from relatively few micro services. As in our Google example, all we need to do is supply the specific parameters every time the service is needed. Google responds with a different latitude and longitude for every postcode. A micro service designed to receive data from a database will return the relevant data once it is given the identity of the database to be queried, which tables the data is in, and any qualifying information such as "all records with the surname Smith". Next, we need a way to define a complete application. An application will be made up of a number of individual services, some of which will already exist either internally or in the public domain and are being re-used. Many will be entirely new and have to be constructed specifically for this application. Each new service will be constructed from a number of micro services and these all already exist within the Eden server. To allow the micro service orchestration layer to arrange instances of the micro services into the grouping needed to create a given service, a set of instructions is required. We have solved this problem by developing a simple drag and drop, orchestration environment, which allows solution providers to define the way a new service or set of services should operate. At execution time, Eden interprets the orchestration and organises instances of the micro services into a matrix. The micro service instances are sequenced within the matrix as follows:
You can see from this that services are designed to communicate electronically with one another. But we also need a service to be able to communicate with a human, so another requirement is for a service to be able to present itself visually. The Datadialogs Eden SOA development has responded to this by adding the ability to attach a re-usable presentation layer to Eden services. Just as it is vital for new services to be created interactively with users, so it is vital that presentation layers can be designed, extended or amended on the fly. So just like the Eden service composer, Eden's presentation designer is an entirely drag and drop, code-free tool. The output from the presentation designer is a JAVA applet. Like the rest of the Eden SOA solution, there is no need to create a new applet every time a new presentation is designed: it's the same applet every time. Each time the applet is called, it requests the display parameters from the Eden SOA server which tell it what it to display this time and where. The applet can be configured to display as an applet, in a web page, or in a portal. This provides the final key to unlock lean IT. Write a complete set of micros services and wrap them in an orchestrator that can organise them into services, provide a codeless way of defining the required rules and parameters, add a codeless presentation layer designer and there it is: an IT system that can support a continuous improvement programme. Using this technology, new business solutions can be created, amended, updated and extended interactively with users on demand. What would once have taken days even with the best development technologies now takes hours. IT is fully integrated into the business improvement process. For more information on Eden and to arrange a product demonstration with one of our product consultants, please contact us | Eden benefits include:
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