Acknowledgments

This book is itself an example of Lean practices. For starters, it was produced by a value stream. Over the years there have been countless individuals in many roles and functions who have contributed what we hope meets the expectations of our customers—you. The book demonstrates pull in the sense that we wouldn’t have written it if we hadn’t received numerous requests from readers of our first book asking for more detailed and prescriptive techniques. It demonstrates just-in-time in that Lean thinking is on a rapid growth curve for adoption across many nonmanufacturing business processes; two years ago the book would have been premature for broad-based adoption, and two years from now there will likely be many books on how to apply Lean to IT processes. It also demonstrates continuous improvement; many ideas in this book were first written as blog articles that resulted in reader feedback, which has improved the quality of the final result.

To fully acknowledge all the individuals and organizations that have contributed to the culmination of Lean Integration could double the length of this book but would not add value to our readers. So we apologize in advance for not mentioning all of the support and contributions we have received over the years. We would, however, like to mention a few noteworthy contributions that we hope will add some value.

The detailed practical examples from real-world situations add a level of depth to the book, and value to our readers, for which we are profoundly grateful. Many thanks go out to the following people for their case study contributions:

• Todd Soller for his support as well as the many people who accomplished the impressive results: Lucas Anderson, Anil Atri, Clark Becker, Charles Betz, Michael Frank, Greg Friesen, Arul James Suneela Kanuri, Mark Karger, Todd Lauinger, Radhika Menon, Lelanie Moll, Balaji Ramaswamy, Rick Sorenson, Bob Steel, and Raghu Venkateshwar

• Michael Levine for the Wells Fargo Post-Closing case study, an amazing example of cycle-time reduction and quality improvement through effective flow-through processes

• Barbara Latullipe for her leadership and insights in applying Lean practices to data quality and master data management at Smith & Nephew

• Gary Kamath and Manish Varma for providing valuable contributions to the case studies

• Patrick Kirkes for his skills in mass customizing integration logic

• Steve Morgan for his persistence in implementing domain models; in conjunction with his organization’s integration hub, the approach provided an impressive ability to mass-customize data in support of organizational agility

Many thanks, in no particular order, also go out to

• Dr. Art Hill, professor at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, for his lessons in Lean and for giving us the idea for the title

• Paul Husby, author of Chapter 2 and most of the terminology in Appendix A, for helping us paint a rich picture of the Lean system as well as providing a history of Lean

• Sohaib Abbasi, CEO at Informatica, for constantly nagging us to write a sequel to the original ICC book

• Brian Hodges, Chris Boorman, Paul Hoffman, and James Markarian, senior executives at Informatica, for their strong support and for giving us the company time, resources, and creative freedom to develop a compelling message

• Kevin Davis, Stephen Dulzer, Jill Dyche, and Tom Poppendieck, for their detailed reviews and comments on the draft manuscript; the book is 100 percent better because of their constructive feedback

• David Linthicum, for encouraging us to write the book and introducing us to the publisher

• Tiffany Gumfory, Jeremy Phelps, and Alison Spong, for handling many of the logistical details associated with simply “getting it done”

• Michael Kuhbock and Leanne MacDonald, for their feedback and providing the support of the Integration Consortium to help make it happen