"Lean" IT

My company is a big booster of Lean manufacturing. It's basically capitalism at it's bare bones where you wring the last bit of value out of every process. We follow the Toyota Business System which is based around the kanban principle. This is reasonably hard core business stuff where if you follow the protocol you will develop a better business. It strikes me that IT can learn a lot from it since they already had a lot of the concepts we've worked on for years like automation and load balancing.

One of Toyota's big competitive advantage was where they broke up all their resources to the atomic (greek, not geek) level and then put them in a pool that can constantly be shifted to what ever makes sense to the company. Kind of like a hypervisor. To do this effectively at that level you need to document and manage every resource at a very well defined level. I'm not there yet.