Posts Tagged ‘Content’
And Now the Bottle-neck is in Operations
In his forthcoming Agile Austin presentation, colleague and friend Michael Cote will be discussing velocity in Agile development vis-a-vis velocity in IT operations. To quote Cote:
Technologies used by public web companies and now cloud computing are looking to offer a new way to deliver applications by addressing deployment and provisioning concerns. Agile software development has sped up the actual development of software, and now the bottle-neck is in operations who’re not always able to deploy software at the same velocity that Agile teams ship code. What do these technologies look like, are they realistic, and how might they affect your organization?
The topic is important from a few perspectives, such as the new business models it enables. With Agile infrastructure, a closed loop is formed between vendor and customer. This loop operates on the basis of close to real-time feedback. The new functionality in the software deployed in the afternoon could be in response to a specific need that was brought up in the morning. Hence, the business focus and the business design change from software that has already been developed and tested (‘done done’) but not yet delivered, to one that has been developed, tested and deployed (‘done done done’) in ultra fast way.
It should also be pointed out that the line between developing content and developing software gets really blurry nowadays. From a company perspective both software and contents are entities that are being made available for dissemination. If you accept the premise that the generation of content and development of the corresponding software should be done under a unified Agile model, the desirability, the power and the benefits of managing development and delivery in unison become obvious. When applied to both content and software, an agile infrastructure paradigm could easily transform the publishing industry, and others.
In short, the business benefits Agile Infrastructure begets trump the (very significant) operational benefits it enables.
Software Moulding Methods
Christian Sarkar and I started an e-dialog on Agile Business Service Management in BSMReview. Both of us are keenly interested in exploring the broad application of Agile BSM in the context of Gartner’s Top Ten Technologies for 2010. To quote Christian:
Israel, where do agile practices fit into this? Just about everywhere as well?
The short answer to Christian’s good question is as follows:
I consider the principles articulated in the Manifesto For Agile Software Development http://agilemanifesto.org universal and timeless. They certainly apply just about everywhere. As a matter of fact, we are seeing the Manifesto principles applied more and more to the development of hardware and content.
The fascinating thing in what we are witnessing (see, for example: Scale in London – Part II, An Omen in Chicago, Depth in Seattle, and Richness and Vibrancy in Boston) is the evolution of the classical problem of managing multiple Software Development Life Cycles. Instead of dealing with one ‘material’ (software), we handle multiple ‘materials’ (software, hardware, content, business initiative, etc.) of dissimilar characteristics. The net effect is as follows:
The challenge then becomes the simultaneous and synchronized management of two or more ‘substances’ (e.g. software and content; software, content and business initiative; or, software, hardware, content and business initiative) of different characteristics under a unified process. It is conceptually fairly similar to the techniques used in engineering composite materials.
Ten years have passed since Evans and Wurster demonstrated the effects of separating the virtual from the physical. As software becomes pervasive, we are now starting to explore putting the virtual back together with the physical through a new generation of software moulding methods.
The Agile Executive 