The Enterprise Leadership site posted a nice piece on ITIL and Six Sigma back in December, and more recently on Getting Six Sigma Right. I want to reflect on this, and expand on my own post a while back which discussed IT Improvement versus Breakthrough.

Quality guru W. Edwards Deming said you can focus on product or process, and for each you can eitherimprove or innovate. For IT organizations, we can expand onDeming’s dimensions inthatwe can improve or innovate both business and IT, and we can improve or innovate both processes and products/services. Today, unless the IT organization is in the IT products business,they are typically dealing with IT services more thanIT products (service management is the focus of ITIL).

A couple of observations on this need for IT organizations to become process and product/service management experts.

1. By and large, IT organizations are not strong in process or service management disciplines. This is changing as IT maturity increases, but is still often not the focus or strength it needs to be.
2. Some companies havea process management group outside the IT organization, based Six Sigma, Lean, or some combination of quality improvement disciplines. From my experience, where these groups do exist, they are not as effective as they would like and need to be. Also, there is typically not a strong partnership between that process group and the IT organization - this is a pity, and limits the effectiveness of both.
3. At the risk of generalizing, where I do see process management groups, they are much more focused on incremental improvement, and less so on innovation.
4. The other “missing piece” for any and all of these improvement/innovation activities is organizational change management. Occasionally, process management groups have people skilled in this discipline, but generally they do not. Sometimes the Human Resources organization has this capability, but this is the exception rather than the rule, and where it exists, it does not have the capacity or bandwidth to meet the needs for this discipline. Sometimes there is a separate Organizational Development group tasked with supporting organizational change efforts. Again, this is generally an understaffed “overhead” group, with limited effectiveness.

I’ve argued for some years that improvement and innovation disciplines ultimately need to be widely dispersed throughout the business. Today, when business success means constant change, this need is even more pronounced. So, where do these disciplines (product, serviceand process improvement and innovation, and organizational change management) come from? Where do they get the focus they need to develop as a capability that can be distributed throughout the business? I believe that the IT organization is best positioned to do this - especially with the recognition that at Level 3 Business-IT Maturity, business and IT converge - i.e.,the disciplines it develops become dispersed throughout the business.