Staying Relevant
by Miki Saxon
Staying relevant is crucial for every functional group in today’s business landscape.
Relevance has nothing to do with being outsourced and everything to do with being necessary to the operations of the enterprise.
Customer service is often outsourced, but no one questions whether it’s relevant to the company’s success.
IT has been outsourced, but now its very relevance is under attack.
This fight is different.
It’s called devops (a contraction of development and operations)
It’s the hardest kind of fight to win, because winning means a major change to both IT process and its cultural DNA; a totally different way of thinking that is based on what has always been anathema to traditional IT — breaking the system.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst explains.
“It’s not a market. It’s a culture and process, in the same way Kaizen or lean manufacturing is process. The problem is that vendors are making it into a market by saying ‘Here’s my devops product.’ But there are no devops products,” Whitehurst says. (…) “If you make a lot of changes, you’ll have to accept a few failures along the way. Throw out planning. Try little things and if they work, do more of them and if not, do less of them.”
So, no devops products, no new markets for vendors to exploit and no definitely no outside experts to do the heavy lifting — although there will be plenty claiming to de devops gurus.
But if there is anything to be learned from companies like Microsoft it’s that cultural change doesn’t come from the outside nor is it changed by edict.
“You start with small, iterative improvements. You release [changes] early and you release them often. That’s what devops is about. It’s a cultural shift. You recognize that big change is hard but little changes are easy. But a whole lot of little changes add up to bigger changes.”
Change is hard, but in this case, change equals survival.
Image credit: N@ncy N@nce
