en-“No-go is the default!” Say what!?

23/06/2018

The title is actually a phrase someone used at a meeting where we discussed a rather complex go-live. I won't go into details; it was just this small phrase that struck me during this particular meeting.

It says a lot about the person and the professionalism he's trying to portray here but actually he is still stuck in the past. Let me elaborate on that.

In IT, we all recognize the people from the operations department protecting 'their servers' and 'their configuration', 'their database' (we all know at least one DBA we had to battle during a project, right?). Hiding behind rules and procedures, put in place to ensure stability and availability. The rules and processes have become a way of their professional life. The main goal of the operations department is to ensure stability and guess what is disrupting stability? Right: changes of software; new software, new functionalities. Every change is a potential threat to stability and availability of services.

In this age of everything (really everything) digital however, we cannot live without software to drive the technology. From a business point of view the only way to survive is to have adaptive and responsive software in place to fully support the ever going faster pace of change in demands. The customer is becoming an IT hungry person, who wants the latest and the greatest features to drive the purchase process, information feed, their watch or whatever you can think of...

No two customers are alike (thanks to big data we are truly finding this out, but that's a totally different topic) and demands are changing faster than ever.

Where does this lead to? Well, a lot of big companies and even more, smaller ones have adapted the DevOps approach to this problem. What problem? The changing demands? Yes and the operations people who truly believe that no-go IS the default. The processes that ensured stability for so long are now slowing down development and progress therefore too much. The rules and regulations have become an obstacle instead of the aid they were before.

Change is necessary: responsibility over regulations and processes, change over stability, redundancy is cheaper than ever, thanks to some pretty smart cloud solutions, ensuring availability in a new and improved way. GO is the default!

I've often spoken about that the business should be about IT, the other way around also applies. IT is also about the business. Being in a DevOps team, working closely together: IT and business, in an agile way is the future (...for now!). 

No stopping that! Go!