Merging Six Sigma and IT

Summary: Most large Six Sigma companies rely on information technology (IT) to achieve their business goals, yet frequently quality methods are not deployed in IT departments to the same extent they are in other parts of the business. Most process control and manufacturing applications function on IT components, and when these components fail, it impacts true process sigma value. For Six Sigma organizations to realize the true benefits of quality management, IT departments must implement the necessary tools to automatically capture measurement data and then calculate Six Sigma compliance. The cost of downtime for IT dependent businesses has been estimated at $13,000 per minute for a typical enterprise resource planning application and $10,000 per minute for a typical e-commerce application. In addition to immediate revenue loss, downtime also leads to customer dissatisfaction and brand erosion. The challenge for deploying Six Sigma across a network application lies more with automatic data collection and correlation than in applying Six Sigma techniques to the collected data. Solutions to the problems of IT quality are beginning to appear in the marketplace, but these solutions should not be measured only on their ability to support Six Sigma techniques. Automated data collection and correlation is the key to successful deployment of this approach in IT.