I did my thesis for one Agile software company in Finland, the F-Secure Corporation. I did also work for the IT Operations team as an IT Engineer and was kind of suprised how difficult the project management and in general delivering the IT projects for Agile organization was. The conclusion I ended up with the study was that the IT could be run in the same fashion as software is developed using Agile methods. It has been interesting to find a similar approach from other sources as well, cloud computing being one of the catalysts in this change.
Devops is a concatenation of development and operations and essentially is the same what I was looking for in my thesis. We did even try the approach in practice and it did work really well! using Agile methods brought the necessary structure in IT projects. In future, this type of new way of doing IT is probably even more valuable, as customers of IT don’t anymore allow a server deployment to take weeks or even months or ever lasting IT projects without clear visibility.
Besides using Agile methods, what else must the IT do in order to fullfil the needs of a modern enterprise? I have already talked about Puppet which is an open source server management automation tool. Datacenter automation is bound to make a big impact in allowing datacenters (private cloud?) to compete with public clouds in ease and agility of deployment. The role of a sysadmin and the developer could start to blur ans sysadmin has to know about how to deploy servers using a scripting language. Interesting times!
