Lean in information technology departments or companies: identifying publications on the Scopus and Web of Science databases

Abstract

Lean management principles include customer focus, continuous improvement and quality through waste reduction for organizations, including IT, bringing benefits such as bringing people together and changing paradigms. In this context, this paper presents a literature review on the current characteristics of lean manufacturing applied to information technology departments or companies. The methodology includes the selection of documents from the Scopus and Web of Science databases, a bibliometric study and a literature review with the selected documents. The bibliometric study identified the document type, language, year of publication, authors, author network, author’s H-index, affiliation, keyword clusters, country or territory and field of knowledge. The VOSviewer software was used to create the maps of the author network and keyword clusters. The literature review presented the main topics of Lean IT, which is a relatively new field of knowledge yet to be fully explored and researched. The results showed that there is no typical pattern regarding the number of publications, and that the concept is still much more used in business than in academy. There is no core of well-defined authors. The Lean methodology is not just the so-called "factory floor". It has been adopted by several other areas; although 50% of the documents are concentrated in two areas: Computer Science and Engineering. Hopefully this paper can contribute as a source of data for future studies on lean management within IT.