DevOps is a cultural and professional movement that stresses communication, collaboration, and integration between software developers and IT operations professionals. DevOps responds to the demands of application and business unit stakeholders for an increased rate of production software releases. Driven by the adoption of agile development processes by IT development organizations, DevOps aims to help organizations rapidly produce quality software products and services. Although the “Ops” in DevOps is often viewed as the technical and application management professionals that deploy and manage applications and their associated infrastructure (e.g., application servers, web servers, and database servers), the service desk supports the goals of DevOps in a number of ways. A goal of DevOps is to produce more frequent software releases. This means the service desk must be prepared to handle a faster rate of change. One way to ensure the service desk is prepared is to engage the serv

As I sit and listen to some classical music, the idea of collaboration comes to mind. To make the music,  the symphony needs to work together, yet play as individual musicians. I cannot play your part, nor can you play mine. By playing each of our parts together as part of the bigger whole, we can create something bigger than either of us. We call this the “primacy of the whole”-the sum is greater than the individual parts. This is the basis of collaboration. Pulling together a group of people into a team and instructing them to use “teamwork” or to “work as a team” does not equate to collaboration. A recent presentation made sense of this. Wikipedia© would not have come together as we know it if all the contributors had been put in the same space and given the instruction to create the site. The online encyclopedia exists precisely because the contributors did not know each other and did not work together in forced cooperation. The contributors created the information because t

There have been many discussions on what is a Service Level Agreement (SLA) or what is an Operational Level Agreement (OLA).   And by the way how does that differ from an Underpinning Contract?   We can agonize over how to measure and what to measure and who, what, where, and how we should manage our internal and external reviews.   Capturing the appropriate knowledge and building in a system for iterative activities and improvement are always a challenge.   Each of these could provoke a lengthy discussion on their own merit.    In this segment I would like to address the thought of who cares!   In other words, what is the real business value for implementing Service Level Management (SLM)? Why do I care about SLM? At the root of it all, the true value of SLM is that it is a vital organ in the systemic approach to integrate the business with IT.    Using SLM to strengthen the relationships between the two provide an opportunity for gleaning benefit from your effort.   For many