And finally, every single IT professional experienced with Six Sigma emphasizes that it absolutely, positively requires top-down buy-in. Six Sigma is an executive-directed transformation tool, and if senior management isn't interested or willing to personally sponsor the strategy, it's going to fail--point blank.

"To have a successful Six Sigma initiative in your company, senior management has to understand its role: to pick teams, decide what measurements are going to matter, establish some form of accountability and visibility, and set up a mechanism to establish and track results," says Alan Larson, author of Demystifying Six Sigma: A Company-Wide Approach to Continuous Improvement who worked at Motorola in the 1980s and was part of the team that introduced Six Sigma to Honeywell.

How Six Sigma Works in IT

Despite its origin in manufacturing, Six Sigma isn't about widgets; the focus is on processes . When applied to IT operations, Six Sigma aims to measure and improve both internal processes, such as network speed and reliability, and line-of-business processes in which IT has a role, such as how well an online ordering system is working.

"IT is a big user of processes: testing and hardware implementation and software development," says Doug Debrecht, vice president and CIO at Raytheon Aircraft, where the entire IT workforce has had some form of Six Sigma training. "Six Sigma has given us a good toolset that we can use consistently and repeatedly to analyze how we have things set up and running."

Six Sigma analysis tends to begin with the formulation of a problem statement. One Six Sigma team at Raytheon, for example, was charged with analyzing why the division had what Debrecht admits was "an ungodly number" of servers--350. "We needed to figure out a way to consolidate and be smarter in how we deployed our servers," he says. The Six Sigma team determined the root cause of the problem--that each application got its own server, regardless of its size or bandwidth requirements--and then worked out the specifics to allow applications to share servers logically and securely. The result: a 40 percent consolidation in servers, with the attendant time and labor savings added back to the bottom line.