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12 IT Trends for 2012: #3 The IT walls come tumbling down (Agile, continuous delivery and Devops)

 
PaulMuller| January 5, 2012 - last edited January 17, 2012
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moneywall.JPGAs part of the ongoing "top 12 for '12" series on IT management disruptions to watch for in 2012. The third and final of my “social IT” trends, is the need to rethink the IT delivery process by re-imagining the roles of development, QA and operations into something founder Patrick Debois coined DevOps.The Devops topic has already received substantial coverage from both my blog and others. In fact Patrick himself recently tweeted, “2011 was the year that vendors finally caught up with DevOps.” 

 

 Whether or not you believe that to be true, I do believe that 2012 will be the year that IT leaders will mobilize their teams as they realize the competitive advantage conferred on those organizations that are able to successfully adopt the core and peripheral tenets of DevOps, loosely speaking they are:

 

  • allowing the developers to specify and deploy infrastructure “as code” (through API calls and meta data) in much the same way they request other resources such as memory (using malloc calls in C for example)  
  • adoption of a continuous deployment model that encourages regular, incremental releases of code changes that are frequently integrated back into a working core/trunk  
  • test driven development and deployment supported by documented requirements, QA & regression suites
  • a system of measures and KPIs that fosters the sustainable adoption of DevOps principals 
  • the automation of all of the above

 

While I acknowledge I've taken more than a little poetic license with the term DevOps, I do believe that in 2012 large enterprises  will begin to formailze the principals outlined above, this will enable them to improve time-to-market (and hence competitiveness) as well as lower their development and operational costs through the reduction of work-in-progress, greater focus on technical debt and ultimately by tracking and improving the measures that matter.

 

The impact of this minor revolution in IT delivery will have far reaching implications for CTOs in terms of technology platforms, for HR leaders in terms of rewards systems and for IT/Business analysts in terms of planning and retiring business services - all of which you can expect to hear more about through the year.

 

I'm concerned that after 20 years I've been doing this too long. Is it just me, or do others feel the winds of change sweeping across IT? 

 

Photo by gavinandrewstewart - http://flic.kr/p/9eMFp

Tags: Agile| devops| IT trends| ITIL| ITSM| View All (7)
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About the Author(s)
  • Alec Wagner is a longtime writer & editor, enterprise IT insider, and (generally) fearless digital nomad.
  • This account is for guest bloggers. The blog post will identify the blogger.
  • I'm the community manager for Discover Performance and have been a writer/editor in the technology field for several years.
  • I've been with HP for 30 years. Half of that time was in R&D, mainly as an architect. The other 15 years has been spent in product management and product marketing. .
  • Mr. Suer is a senior manager for IT Performance Management. Prior to this role, Mr. Suer headed IT Performance Management Analytics Product Management including IT Financial Management and Executive Scorecard.
  • Paul Muller leads the global IT management evangelist team within the Software business at HP. In this role, Muller heads the team responsible for fostering HP’s participation in the IT management community, contributing to and communicating best-practice in helping IT perform better.
  • As Vice President and General Manager for HP Software in EMEA, I lead an end-to-end software team across all of HP’s European operations. As founder of a Uruguay based software developer I understand the real issues businesses are facing and the vital role technology can play in solving them.


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