The modus operandi for developers over the last decade has been, “Throw your application over the wall to operations and forget about it!” As information technology matured, we became more specialised; some people specialised in programming languages, others in networking, some in operating systems and databases. Before this specialisation occurred, you had to know about all facets of the computing technology. Somewhere along the way developers stopped thinking about operations and operations people stopped caring about how the applications work. These are two disparate silos with little communication in between.

The return on investment of an application starts only when it’s deployed and made available to the end users. The brilliance that goes into designing, programming and testing it has no inherent value to the business until the application is in production. Development teams build the application but operations people have to make it work. Unlike during development in a controlled environment with a few users, they have to make it work for a wide audience in the production world against real-world data, real-world user behaviours and real-world uncertainties. The success of the development team depends on how well the operations team handles the application once it is chucked over the wall.

The goals and motivations of applications and operations teams are very different. The manager of the applications group wants projects to be delivered on time, using least amount of resources, sticking to the best practices and yielding reusable code. The manager of the operations group wants to have the highest level of availability serving the most number of users with fewest operators – all the while meeting or exceeding any service level agreements and without compromising security. Other than the fundamental “I want to spend as little as possible and get the most value for my money”, there is no overlap between applications and operations goals.

Developers stopped thinking about operations & ops stopped caring about how the applications work.

Working for application service

To mitigate the differences in how applications and operations teams see the world, we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture: The information technology organisation is comprised of the applications and operations people existing to serve the needs of the business. The business looks to improve its operational efficiency by reducing the cost of how it operates through the use of technology.

The business also wants to achieve competitive advantage through the use of technology to differentiate itself. Technology is now the de facto means of communication between the business and its customers, suppliers, partners. IT organisations provide a set of services to cater to the needs of the business. Ultimately, when combining applications development and operations, the IT organisation provides application service for the business.

Developers build, operations staff serves and business users consume the application service. For the most part, the business doesn’t care what the underpinnings are, as long as the service meets their expectations. Once the service is available, it is no longer relevant to the end user if, for example, their email servers are powered by Linux or Windows. It makes little difference if the CRM application is hosted in-house or elsewhere.