AgileOperations.net is a resource for CIOs and IT managers who are attempting to adjust their departments to the new realities of slashed budgets, sophisticated and demanding end-users, and vendors eager to bypass IT entirely and sell web-based services directly to the business. Some IT organizations are clinging even in this environment to old notions of tight, centralized control and rigorous blocking of outside services in favor of traditional internal IT tools. They may as well be buffalo standing on the tracks of the Northern Pacific as the first train barreled along toward Promontory Point from the east. The landscape of technology is changing, and the intelligent IT executive now has to walk a tightrope, balancing increasing user demands and external threats against the overall health of the business. Major consulting firms and market analysts are urging IT to become "lean" by continuing centralization and cost cutting, but lean doesn't necessarily mean flexible, and inflexible IT organizations will be bypassed and phased out as online services commoditize traditionally valuable internal services.
Agile Operations is a concept which combines lean, low-cost service delivery with flexible, just-in-time response to business demands, helping you keep your department relevant and competitive with trendy low-cost solutions available outside the business. In a sort of technology judo, Agile Operations seeks to use the strengths of these alternatives against them, keeping the flexibility and the savings in house and under the control of the IT department without resorting to heavy-handed prohibitions and lock-down measures which simply serve to force users further and further from a state of trust and understanding with the CIO.
