IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology

8.8. The changing role of the operations department

Under the traditional model, once a project is delivered, the resulting application(s) are handed over to the operations group to run from a production and service standpoint, ensuring availability, response times and support. Implicit in this model is a fully tested and fully documented solution which works as planned, and conforms to the appropriate technical and operational acceptance criteria. This is only to be expected, since operations runs the company's core systems (sales, order management...), sometimes on a 24/7 basis, which consequently have to be reliable.

Under the new model however, the first version would, by definition, not represent a finished product so to speak, but merely the first in a series of successive versions and releases. The robustness of the first version (and especially the pilot version before that, where applicable) might therefore not be 'production grade', and probably won't become so till at least the second or third version a year later.

So the question is 'Who runs the initial versions of the application under the new model?' – operations or the development group that built it? Experience shows that at least during the first year the application should be owned from a production standpoint by the original development group, until such time as business processes mature and reliability increases. This would ensure the responsiveness needed to continue to deliver results in a rapidly changing ...