Making IT Lean

Lean IT Service Management  ◾  167

ever-present and changing, and not all are observable, but the ones that are

important are monitored so that observations can be made, and many of

these are actionable. That is, we monitor an activity so we can do something

if thresholds are reached; we monitor so we can identify trends over time; or

we simply monitor because something happened in the past and we want to

make sure it doesn’t happen again.

For this, we use monitoring tools and, as we saw in Chapter 3, the pro-

cesses that accompany monitoring are subject to Lean inquiry. The interplay

between process and tool also is important as the following examples illus-

trate. Alerts set at the wrong thresholds will trigger actions that represent

waste, ...