Business Agility and how IT supports it
The “Agility” concept has been a buzzword in business management science (what you might call the MBA crowd) long before it reached IT and software development. It was based on the ideas of lean manufacturing, such as just-in-time, continuous improvement, quality circles, and so on.
In order to meet the challenges of the marketplace, companies need to change frequently to introduce new ways of working, new functions, and connect to new customers, partners and suppliers. Even a non-commercial organisation has to adapt to changing legal, political and social pressures, and try to improve cost-efficiency. Any organisation that has moved beyond paper-and-pencil will need its IT to adapt accordingly.
The direct responsibility for changes like these will in many cases lie with a development team. They will have to produce a new application, or a new version of an existing one. Alternatively a new app may be purchased, or an old one reconfigured to support new tasks.
But then the responsibility passes to SysAdmin - to integrate and deploy these new technologies with a minimum of business disruption. New servers may need to be installed; additional capacity provided; new permissions added; new firewall configurations set up.
So there’s a cascading set of pressures: a changing world means the business has to adapt, and developers and vendors all race to keep up. Underneath it all, the SysAdmin function has to integrate these changes while keeping everything running smoothly.
The main business pressures on SysAdmin are:
- control costs
- ensure performance & capacity
- ensure stability (uptime)
- enable functionality
- introduce system changes quickly
This list is hardly a new concept, but that doesn’t make it any easier to satisfy. Clearly costs will increase as you enhance the other four elements, but the others can conflict too – multiple redundancy for stability can reduce performance; offering the richest platform functionally (e.g. multiple choices of OS or language) so you can accommodate any whims of your developers may lead to a complex environment that eventually stagnates.
In recent years, the emergence of Agile practices in development has been due to a recognition that a “grand strategy” for product development, planning years into the future, is doomed to failure. This is because neither the development process nor business requirements are predictable at a detailed level beyond the short term.
So in a world where business requirements will change, development output is unknown in the medium term, and new technologies are being continually introduced, the main challenge for SysAdmin is to provide a lean environment that can adapt to (nearly) anything. There do need to be some constraints - your developers cannot expect to switch from Linux to Windows at no notice, and you will probably have some mandatory guidelines on architecture, etc.
But to be any use at all, Agile SysAdmin has to describe ways to meet these objectives faster and with fewer resources than ever before.