Although enterprise administration should be
straightforward, and it can be, many evolutionary/agile development teams find
existing enterprise administration groups difficult to work with. Some of
that difficulty lies in a weak appreciation within agile methods of enterprise
issues (hence the importance of
Agile Data's
2nd philosophy), but most of the challenge lies with the inflexible, often
bureaucratic, and often serial approaches preferred by the administration
groups. Much of the problem lies in the administration-oriented frameworks
such as
Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) and
Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
which are invariably implemented in a command-and-control, instead of a
collaborative, manner. COBiT and ITIL each have some good ideas in them (ITIL
seems to have more, IMHO),
but like development processes based on the Capability Maturity Model (CMM)
Integrated (CMMI) the final implementation often proves to be less than
effective. Worse yet, from what I've seen, many organizations are
attracted to these frameworks because they're seen as the first step towards
outsourcing portions of your IT organization: get a well defined process in
place, get good at following it, then start outsourcing to lower-cost companies
who have also adopted those frameworks. The good news is COBiT hasn't
gained much of a foothold within the IT community, and considering how long it's
been since it was inflicted on us my hope is that it never really will.
ITIL, on the other hand, does seem to be gaining in popularity so hopefully we
can make it effective by tailoring agile concepts into it. |
 |