Six Sigma has been extremely successful when applied to manufacturing and transactional processes and large efficiency gains and savings have been made in those industries. However, Six Sigma remains almost unknown in the fields of Information Technologies (IT) and software engineering despite the obvious need for radical improvements in these industries.

Why is this? Do we assume IT and software engineering to be so different from other industrial processes that Six Sigma methods don’t work?

The main issue would seem to be the notion that software engineering is intangible and innovative in nature and is therefore not suitable for the application of rigorous disciplines such as Six Sigma.

Unfortunately this notion has been reinforced by several companies who have attempted to apply manufacturing or transactional versions of Six Sigma without adaptation. While Six Sigma concepts and methods are generally useable across a broad range of industries it has always been known that adaptation for specific industries would be required.

Systonomy is dedicated to the application of Six Sigma and DFSS to IT and Software Development from real-time and embedded systems to Management Information Systems including the implementation and integration of COTS, EAI, ERP systems, CRM, Financial Systems etc.

Some of the key attributes that have to be considered in applying Six Sigma to IT and Software Development include:
 

	Software Engineering is a social discipline; unlike other engineering disciplines, there is no separation between the knowledge of how to develop products and the knowledge of how to organise development processes.
	Software engineering is a particular engineering discipline where the work is mostly on models and rarely on real world objects.
	Information and Software Systems are layered systems. They are built upon systems, which are themselves built upon other systems. They are designated as complex systems having emergent properties (e.g. safety, security and some aspects of reliability).
	Last but not least, Information System and Software Engineering is a first and foremost an Engineering of Evolution and not only and Engineering of Construction. In that sense, it would be closer to life science and bioengineering than civil engineering and manufacturing.

In addition to these inherent properties, there are many process improvement methods that are often perceived as competitors with Six Sigma such as CMM, CMMI, ISO Tickit, ITIL and more recently Agile methods. This often leads to misconceptions whereby organisations believe that Six Sigma is only applicable at high levels of maturity (e.g. CMM level 3 or 4) and not realising that Six Sigma is actually a continuous improvement method applicable at any maturity level.