What, Why, When, Where, How, “You”

One of the recurring themes currently in Enterprise IT is the desire for the cost and agility seemingly promised by Cloud and DevOps approaches.  Don’t get me wrong, I see the benefits that organisations using these gain.  I am actually a great supporter of infrastructure as code, and even if I dislike the term ‘Software Defined’ I like what it is referring to.

My issue, which is a recurring theme in this blog, is the idea that an organisation can adopt these approaches by writing a check.

Fundamentally, these are not technology solutions but process and culture changes.  You can run your application in the cloud, but if you stick to quarterly release cycles and it can’t scale dynamically you are not going to see the benefit you expect.

On the flip side, if you take your enterprise environment, with hundreds of applications that are interface with each other, and suddenly abandon your tried and true test process to start using Continuous Deployment you are asking for trouble.

I am not trying to argue against either cloud or continuous deployment, but I am arguing for a measured approach.

Go back to basics, ‘What’, ‘Why’, ‘When’, ‘Where’ and ‘How’.

1. What are you trying to do?
2. Why are you doing it?
3. Where will you gain the benefits?
4. When will you introduce the changes and in what order?
5. How are you going to do things differently?  

In the last point I mean you, the reader.  Whatever your role in the organisation, you need to be part of the change, not an observer.  If you are reading this, and thinking that this only applies to ‘people who report to you’ or ‘that other team’, think again.

    Owen Hollands