DailyKaizen

The first step of the LEAN process is to interview leaders from the prospective area.  During this interview you ask questions about the process to determine if the opportunities are worth pursuing.  One of the questions that I always ask a local leader is what they believe is the greatest opportunity for improvement in the area.  Without exception the answer is always the same: “we need a new Information System” or “if we only had the ability to automate are problems would go away.”

Yesterday for example I spent three hours walking a process with a group of leaders.  We then returned to a conference room to debrief.  I asked the group what opportunities they identified and got back a list of fourteen ideas, eleven of them having to do with updating or tweaking the IS system.  An unfortunate conclusion since we have zero dollars in our budget to invest in technology.  Once the meeting had adjourned I spent a couple of minutes going over my notes from the walk with the sponsor.  I had identified eight opportunities for improvement and only one related to the IS system (Not using it any more).  The other seven were focused on eliminating handoffs, eliminating batches, measuring FTQ, etc.

The difference in findings does not surprise me, especially since we are looking at an administrative process.  Over the last ten years the organization has invested countless millions of dollars buying IS systems which have been installed with the purpose of automating process.  The problem is that we never had the time or money to clean up and reduce the waste in the process before we automated them, thus we have locked in the waste.  Once automated it is very expensive to change these processes and our Information Services Division does not have nearly enough resources to handle the cries from every corner of the organization for support.

Moving forward I hope the organization requires departments to apply LEAN principles before they are allowed to install new IS systems.  The good news is that we already seem to be moving in that direction with LEAN projects underway pre-implementation in many areas including e-watson, ISD-Ready, EpicCare, etc.

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