Agile must not mean Fragile...Just ask Jack

IS IT FIXED YET !!

We’ve all been there, it’s the middle of the night, the application is down, conference calls ongoing, bleary eyed engineers remotely logged in scraping every log they can to troubleshoot, your senior execs await knuckles clenched as they dread the next call from their client’s executives.

Well, times are changing and they need too…and FAST

In recent conversations with several CXOs and IT executives, the same common themes seem to crop up time and time again as their organisations grow, their IT environments are becoming more and more a tangled web of architecture with a complex scenario of legacy and modern infrastructure and application components assembled over the years.

Adding to the complexity each component usually had its own management system thus leading to multiple incongruent tools & silos of technologies. This then led to a game of internal politics and a blame culture as ownership became more obscure.

Unsurprisingly, these tools are usually critical to the running of the systems or the production of vital data, with the stability almost certainly supported by the known error database or shall we simply call him Jack.

Jack is that hero, you know the one. Never leaves his desk, works 12 hours a day in the office, always online at home, call him and he's there...we all love Jack.

BUT

As technology enters the Digital age, Transformation initiatives are now becoming vital. It is the buzzword in the boardroom. This is the reason “Ops” in “DevOps” is key.

Traditional Operations is fast becoming stale, Jack is becoming stale, trundling along, lacking the acceleration and collaboration required to align with the DevOps Agile culture.

Why should the business care you may ask?

As the business demands grow, bigger goals are set, and IT sacrifices manageability and reliability in favour of innovation and speed to meet aggressive deadlines. This results in an accumulation of technical debt, the risk of legacy infrastructure lying dormant and increased overhead.

IT organisations must blow away these isolated boundaries and streamline efforts to collaboratively manage complete services. In other words, EMBRACE AGILE OPERATIONS.

“How do we do this?”

1.     Automated Deployments – imagine a world where Jack can simply with a few clicks roll back any deployments to a known good place or a deployment applies all configuration requirements at the touch of a button.

2.     Increased Visibility – provides the foundation for collaboration once the application is in production. Developers will be alert to malfunctions by the application, without this Jack and his operations team will not detect any unusual behaviour in the app and would end up chasing red herrings.

3.     Troubleshooting – most common cause of contention between development and operations. Operations worst nightmare is allowing production access to anyone (You can imagine the face on Jack !), this means moving away from the screen sharing / log sharing culture embedded over the years. A much more automated system must be in place to allow the developer to investigate and resolve

So next conversation

“How do we retain the quality of our operations as we turn the steering wheel towards a new era of dynamic and evolving change?”

Gone are the days of the technology focussed, immovable systems of record, avoiding risk and change. IT Operations must support agile, dynamic infrastructure typified by Big Data and Cloud services.

 IT monitoring processes must

·      Be capable of ensuring new platforms reliably scale as per design.

·      Must change to support the Speed of delivery

·      Ensure Quality – Agile must not mean Fragile.

It is a tough ask and many organisations are still struggling to grasp this concept, continuing with ongoing conflict due to weak collaboration and hazy accountability and always ending up in a blame game.

CXOs must realise that application resilience and stability will only improve when Operations is active as part of the lifecycle and share in release sign offs and gate 1 and not 6…and yes that means talking to Jack…(I hope we will talk to you)