News Feature

Quality Methodology: Six Sigma Comes to IT

By Edward Prewitt

August 15, 2003 — CIO — Six Sigma, as most people in the business world have heard by now, is a program and toolkit for improving quality in manufacturing processes. Originated by Motorola in the late 1980s, the Six Sigma methodology aims to reduce variations in a process—in other words, defects. The term sigma refers to standard deviations from an ideal level of operation; put simply, each level of sigma allows fewer defects than the preceding level. If a company manages to get up to six sigma, that’s a mere 3.4 defects per million outputs.

How nice for those on the shop floors of the world, you say. Now back to IT business. But it so happens that a few resourceful CIOs are applying Six Sigma methods to the functioning of their IT departments. Among CIO 100 honorees, Raytheon Aircraft’s IT department has used Six Sigma to improve claims processing and save the company $13 million. IT staffers at J.P. Morgan Chase have applied the methodology to standardize the company’s processes and measure the impact of technology programs. And Seagate Technology’s CIO has sent most of his IT employees to Six Sigma training in an effort to change the department’s approach to problem solving.

"Six Sigma is about taking your IT organization and getting it under control," says Mark A. Brewer, senior vice president and CIO of computer manufacturer Seagate Technology. Brewer says that Six Sigma methods work as well in reducing errors across IT operations as they do in manufacturing processes—because IT operations are a kind of factory, with inputs, desired outputs and parameters that must be controlled. "If I view IT operations as a factory, then Six Sigma applies immediately. I have a factory, it’s just data centers, networks, servers, VPN, help desks and so on," he says.

Seagate’s IT department booked direct savings from Six Sigma analyses of $3.7 million during the previous fiscal year. Since instituting Six Sigma two years ago, the IT department has saved $4.5 million overall. (The company as a whole reports saving more than $956 million from Six Sigma since adopting the methodology five years ago.) Brewer talked with Senior Editor Edward Prewitt about how he came to Six Sigma, why it’s a methodology that resourceful IT departments should consider and how Seagate IT applies it.

CIO: When did you adopt Six Sigma?
MARK BREWER: About five years ago, we recognized we wanted a transformational kind of change throughout the company [in response to production problems and lowered PC demand that led to a $530 million loss in 1998]. We went out and looked at what other companies were doing to improve their processes. Companies that had Six Sigma seemed to have something different; it wasn’t just slogans and feel-good Quality Circles. It was heavy-duty statistical analysis of problems and a way to attack them. I went to engineering school for eight years and learned lots of things, but nowhere did I learn this kind of methodology for solving problems.