Over time, the IT discipline has developed two giant silos: development and operations regimes. While the development team focuses on building software, introducing changes and fulfilling both internal and external customers' demands, the operations team focuses on stability, reliability and system performance. Having contradicting and competing objectives has resulted in a metaphoric wall that separates both teams and impacts value delivery. It has led to the assumption that the IT function is a bottleneck in an organization’s value delivery systems rather than being a trusted strategic partner.
Bringing down this wall requires dealing with the underlying root causes: Different mindsets; different tools, process and environments; and lack of continual communication and feedback loops:
- Different mindsets—Development teams have a ninja mindset; they focus on agility, speed and velocity. Their objective is to constantly introduce new changes, whether that be new features, enhancements or bug fixes. On the other side of the wall, operations teams have a samurai mindset; they focus on stability, robustness and resilience, where any change introduced is seen as a source of instability.
- Different tools, processes and environments—The disintegrated processes between development and operations teams are based on different frameworks such as ITIL, COBIT and Agile, which can lead to the teams adopting various types of toolsets, working in different environments (production, testing) and having different vocabularies and priorities, thus intensifying the wall of IT.
- Lack of continual communication and feedback loops—The development and operations teams work in isolation until the critical moments of the software delivery when development teams send completed changes over the wall to operations for deployment and release. This limits communication. Another critical moment is when operations teams receive customer complaints and send problems back to the development teams. Furthermore, in many IT organizations, the feedback is limited to the traditional blame game, which leads to more fragmented regimes.
So how can teams bring down this great wall of IT?
Many frameworks and models such as DevOps emerged to bring down this wall and reunite the two silos again. In addition, an effective way that organizations can follow is The Three Ways Approach, which includes:
- The first way—Improving the flow from development to operations
- The second way—Improving feedback from operations to development
- The third way—Continual experimentation between both teams
Editor’s note: For further insights on this topic, read Abdelelah Alzaghloul’s recent Journal article, “A Three-Way Approach for Breaking Down the Great Wall of IT,” ISACA Journal, volume 1, 2022.
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