IT, we can argue, has been given poor treatment in popular culture. Is it rigid, faceless, bureaucratic, and colorless as it has been depicted in so many media sources? Unfortunately we will have to say "yes" and "no."
“No,” because a field so hectic, on the cutting edge of technology, has to have some dynamism in order to be effective. However, we will also have to say “yes,” because organizations have worked in many formal methodologies that enforce the idea of IT as a clockwork mechanism.
This is best exemplified by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). While not every organization has adopted it, similar principles can be seen all over the world of enterprise IT. ITIL is, formally defined, a set of practices for aligning IT with business goals. More informally (but accurately), it is a massive, rigid set of guidelines that outline exactly how IT managers should approach the following:
- Service Strategy
- Service Design
- Service Transition
- Service Operation
- Continual Service Improvement
Certification in ITIL is a multi-path, multi-level process that can actually cost as much as a college degree. Nevertheless, it can springboard people to excellent IT leadership positions. It involves test questions such as this, however;
Hmm. Perhaps this type of thinking is well and good for steady IT operations that are just trying to keep the ship afloat while also staying out of the way, but in a modern IT environment easy “find the true statement” answers like this are not all that helpful. Furthermore, such specific processes lead to an extremely stereotyped, rigid idea of what IT entails, guaranteeing that it will adhere to those stuffy characterizations alluded to at the start of this blog. Of course, more than just enforcing a certain image of IT, overgrown processes can also hinder IT operations from adapting to today's rapidly shifting markets.
Should there be a change in IT philosophy? Fortunately, such a change is already underway. In an upcoming piece we will discuss DevOps – which can be characterized as what happens when agile computer software development meets pretty much every other aspect of enterprise IT.
