“Unless you are an OS vendor or tools company, if your business has to care about operating system end-of-life announcements, IT has failed. If your business has to care about audit/compliance exposure due to old operating systems, IT has failed. If, as a business what operating system you run is a point of contention, IT has abdicated its responsibility.” – From Can You DevOps from Windows, Steven Murawski (Blogger)
Heavy conversation this week around engineering technology infrastructure, cloud, DevOps, and why companies are struggling with this shift. This article popped into view and perfectly explains the problematic nature of IT at large organizations. Steven describes it as “The Passivity of Enterprise IT”, liking IT leadership as order takers and janitors of the software world.
DevOps core values are described by the acronym CAMS: Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing. DFW hosts an DevOps user group and the re-occurring theme is not the A-M-S, although there are legacy challenges there too. In my experience, start with C, Culture.
What’s the point? This week’s quote is about IT’s real role: providing business value. Steven goes on to say, “IT is not just responsible for executing projects. IT is responsible for making sure the project will return business value. IT is responsible for making sure projects are done in a supportable manner.”
What’s your IT look like? Are you an order taker or doing what information technology’s real role is: provide business value. And please read Steve’s post. How Microsoft does DevOps will continue to garner large interest. How that’s done will get you a hundred different answers.
\\ JMM