In high tech, we have a penchant for not actually having an end goal. We have interim goals but no grand “this is what we need to do.” And yet, every space inevitably has a “this is the reason” attached. So what should the overarching goal of DevOps be?
We started out with streamlining processes as the goal, and quickly morphed into efficiency and being more responsive–all worthy goals, but it is the nature of both technologists and business people (for very different reasons) to not stop when the goal is reached. We went through several more iterations that all basically pulled more under the DevOps umbrella, and then settled on automation. AI will continue this automation trend, but to what end?
Where, exactly, do we want to go? Theoretically, we could make AI write the code, build the code, test the code and deploy the code with only a small contingent of actual people involved in the process. Seriously, if the idea is to let business people crank things out a la the promises of 4GLs, then we are closer than we have ever been to achieving that goal.
But, much like calculators, someone will still have to create these systems, and we are faced with a different conundrum: If no one is writing new code, learning-based AI will struggle to solve new problems. That challenge can, in theory, be overcome by teaching AI to disassemble and abstract existing solutions, but that will take time.
The other thing that business people and technologists share in the modern world is a lack of actual philosophers. I am a technologist, but much of my immediate family enjoys philosophy. So, I dug into philosophy with regard to science many years ago, and philosophers, being esoteric, ruined their ability to influence scientific thought. Focusing on questions like, “What if tomorrow, we found aluminum that wasn’t really aluminum?” was dumb and undermined the core idea of “Science will tell us what we can do, philosophy will tell us what we should do.”
So we’re on our own in that regard, and given a worldwide development community, we can assume that just because you can, someone will. Our question then is, “What does a given enterprise want and need from their DevOps processes?” The rate of change is about to accelerate again, so knowing what is important to your organization will matter in the next five years. A company that uses technology in support roles has wildly different needs than one that uses technology to develop products, and they have very different needs than a company for whom technology is the product.
Is the goal to eliminate the bulk of IT? Or is it to streamline IT even further and make it even more responsive to business needs? Perhaps the goal is to develop entirely new products or markets with the time that AI has freed up. The difference is huge in terms of planning. And these are the types of questions coming. The idea that any given technology can make things (or make them happen) faster and more efficiently without changing staffing is naïve and ignores the history of the auto industry.
Get together, IT and business leaders. Develop a plan. Do you want to do more with less, or do you want to reduce overhead? Do you want to have IT specialize while AI does the mass of generic work? Level one help desk can be taken over by chatbots today. Is that the type of direction the organization wants to go? Tell IT management that change is coming; the question is, how the organization wants to leverage it and conscious decision is far better than accidental results.
