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

I got more and more info regarding DevOps and how good it is within the last weeks. I even started posting at some of their blogs and during my first steps I really liked it, it looked like being a good approach to keep on driving the idea of an operational platform. Nothing new, but another good driver for bringing Operations as a discipline of operating and engineering upfront.

The more I think on that the more I believe that this is just another approach and it will take a much longer time and much more approaches like DevOps to convert Operations from a barrier to a driver within tons of organizations.

You disagree? See why: In the past we have seen some very interesting scenarios. One – very long supported by all departments within companies – was to see IT operators as the barrier of truth. Whoever and however you survived talking to them ,you were a hero. Introducing new functionality was more or less incredible and they – the IT Operators – always believed that they save business’ live by acting as a barrier for innovation. Even keeping things slow was king to them.

The other typical operations department was a little bit more open as they were seen as the IT engineers unable to write code. So those 3rd class employees needed work and why not acting on the simple infrastructure basis? They really did not like Development and you know why … they developed their own style, their own culture and propably this was not the intention of the business. They tried to establish themselve as the better IT within the IT …

Those 2 artefacts really need DevOps or alternatives like our Platform Engineering, dialects of ITIL or others. The question is how to transform from barrier thinking to business enabling.

If you understand operations as the fundament of business than you definitely need strong, accepted and rich of engineers operations, not barrier minded, not 3rd class developers, not people stopping invention during mainframe area. Those will neither accept DevOps nor anything else, everything was already there and they know when and why …

Beside DevOps think more not on the tool (DevOps may be one), think on how you can transform your IT opps organization to a living one, being well accepted with good and strong communications, transparent operations and KPI willingness. By starting the cultural change you potentially will result in DevOps, but DevOps itself will not result your organization in good communications, transparen ops …