Using Metamodeling to Represent Lean Six Sigma for IT Service Improvement

Abstract

In today's competitive market, the need to continuously improve quality and lead time of IT services becomes more important. Over the last decades, too much complexity has been added to IT organizations after they had introduced IT frameworks like COBIT for IT Governance or ITIL for IT service management. As a result, many organizations face process inefficiencies and an increase in IT operational costs. Even though COBIT and ITIL, that we use as a reference in our research, contain continuous improvement (CI) processes and guidelines, their approach and effectiveness has been criticized. In this paper, we propose to apply Lean and Six Sigma, CI-approaches that gained popularity in other areas in industry, to CI of IT services. We use metamodeling to integrate Lean and Six Sigma to develop an integrated approach of Lean Six Sigma for CI of IT Services. Our Metamodels provide a visual representation to capture and integrate the main elements of Lean, Six Sigma, and Lean Six Sigma and model their interface with the IT Services framework. We apply metamodeling as part of a Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) and use the Framework for Evaluation in Design Research (FEDS) to evaluate our results using practitioners in the evaluation. The objective of our research is to present a standard method for IT-Services CI. The resulting framework should support the design and implementation, in a standard way, of CI organizations to improve IT Service delivery.