Reply to post: DevOps by Fiat (not the car manufacturer)

IBM gives Services staff until 2019 to get agile

Erik4872

DevOps by Fiat (not the car manufacturer)

This is symptomatic of a larger problem...fear of missing out by companies is forcing them to send in the management consultants and force-feed a "digital transformation" initiative on them. On the surface, it looks like another ITIL -- just buy a ticketing and change management system off the shelf and Bob's your uncle.

What everyone is missing is that to do it right, you need a total culture change. I've only understood this in the past few months (and yes, I'm very late to the party, thanks for noticing.) I work at a non-IBM IT services company that's doing something similar, but IMO has a greater chance of actually succeeding. For me, being in systems engineering, the big hurdle has been the --WALL OF TOOLS-- that cloud the actual change that has to happen under the hood. Telling someone that they can't manually make a change, and instead have to feed it through a meat-grinder of CI/CD stuff, who has directly worked with systems their whole career, is a big mind-shift. The Devs have been in control of DevOps for the most part, and so everything is designed to make infrastructure go away. IT services people understand infrastructure and most don't do much software development beyond automating tasks. Meeting in the middle appears to be the key for systems people.

The problem is that the culture change is pretty radical. IBM will have a very hard time, as would any company relying on resources nine time zones away who are pretty disinterested. The reason an "ideal" DevOps system works so well is because the ideal system is a 10-person startup, all in the same office, all understanding every aspect of the operation, and all working over 90 hours a week cranking out fixes and features. It's much harder to implement when your resources are all over the place, and in some cases you don't control them. It sounds like they're just trying to use this as an excuse to get rid of anyone still left in a high-cost country.

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