Reviewing recent discussions at customers and after reading the book http://www.amazon.com/The-Phoenix-Project-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592 I am wondering if we are simply using the wrong values to certify our organizations success.
If you take a look at IT Operations, you see that they find themselves as being successful, when they provide the most stable infrastructure possible. With that, you have very long release cycles, very long patch cycles, and configuration changes can take ages. Alongside you need to wait years before you get something delivered from them, like a QA Environment. That is of course due to the fact, that Operations needs to ensure that enough resources are available, and that there will be no impact on production requests by this QA Environment request.
Developers on the other hand are often valued by the time they are able to implement features. If the in-house development team is not quick enough, or is simply not able to deliver, they turn to System Integrators. While it is true that System Integrators have a large amount of projects to show, it is not guaranteed, that the delivery army has ever worked in such a project. Nor have they experience in the later production environment, because let us be honest, every production environment and every deployment process is different … very different. Because developers cannot wait for the Operations team to provide Development environments they start with their development on local machines or they consume cloud services.
That being said, it is very often the case, that development is started on a non-standadized platform, using non-standard development frameworks and tools. That on the other hand leads to long, painful and error-prone integration timelines.
What about the business…
Well the business owners, they are responsible to drive the company forward. Growth is key, how you achieve growth is not of interest. Without growth, investors will not be happy, Analysts are going to rip you apart, so you trust anyone … anyone who is good in selling the story that if business follows his path, they will have guaranteed growth. Of course during selling, no one told them about these problems, the long integration time, etc. Everyone told them it just works. Of course they are looking for someone to blame, because they are in trouble now. Since it is in most cases the Developers fault for not using nor asking about the production environment AND the Operations fault for not providing the development environment quick enough, they blame each other, because no one wants to take full responsibility.