Adoption curves in agile trends

Based on my own anecdotal experiences, agile operations and DevOps have garnered quite a lot of buzz in the past year or so, but are still far from being commonly used in practice. Steve Shah at Citrix has written a post that seems to echo that observation, while clearly and concisely explaining why that is the case and why it isn't necessarily a negative commentary on the methodologies involved.

Steve points to a factor I have often mentioned, that for many organizations DevOps just doesn't make sense, and ties in two other factors I had not: the natural conflicts of human enthusiasm with actual capabilities, and the general business perspective of CIOs that many of the advantages of adoption will naturally cascade out of other IT initiatives, namely the general migration to utility computing solutions. The first I often overlook in my own enthusiasms; the second reflects another long-held belief of mine that it is vital to get management on board when attempting to implement these methodologies. If there is a groundswell of support for them but little effort to bring management on board, what you see is exactly the attitude that Steve reports, and the adoption levels point to the actual influence that IT management has over these efforts, be they stealthy or not.

My gut take on agile development adoption is that it occurred fairly rapidly. But then programming conventions have often adopted rapidly; new languages propagate quickly, why not new organizational techniques? Programming teams tend to be smaller and less rigid by nature than operations teams so it makes some sense that they could swivel to agile more rapidly.

I suspect that agile operations adoption will swell first in mid-sized organizations, those large enough to require some sort of IT organization, but not so large that the organization is self-sustaining. The low hanging fruit for agile operations is in organizations with expanding technology requirements and increasing challenges from consumerized technology.