Tom Peruzzi's thoughts on digital, innovation, IT and operations

This is definitely what often happens in startup companies. You have an idea, you have a development team and you have business/expenditure pressure. The easiest way is to let developers do IT Ops stuff (backup, monitoring, day2day operations …) But what happens if you do so?

First, there is no difference between an inventer (developer) and an operator thou there is no border between fancy new stuff and a stable platform. Secondly, there is no declared transformation process which shifts the proven and checked app to the operational platform. Third, those 2 groups think totally different. While a developer is interesting in getting new fancy stuff done, an operator’s holy grale is to provide a stable, reliant and proven (never changing) platform.

Next if you don’t differ, you will have real trouble keeping dev tasks out of the online/productive environment. How fast it would be for a developer to fix a bug online, if he don’t has to test it in the background? But this means, acting online, thou no protection line, no border for safetiness between.

There will be endless discussion and yes, there are even examples out there showing that developer and operator can be one person without any probs, but the vast majority of IT people out there will not be able to do the same.

So keep in mind: Different tasks with different attitude and behaviour need different people!