"kanban" entries
Deploy Continuous Improvement
Balancing the work it takes to improve capability against delivery work that provides value to customers.
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Building an Optimized Business
Download a free copy of Building an Optimized Business, a curated collection of chapters from the O’Reilly Web Operations and Performance library. This post is an excerpt by Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, and Barry O’Reilly from Lean Enterprise, one of the selections included in the curated collection.
In most enterprises, there is a distinction between the people who build and run software systems (often referred to as “IT”) and those who decide what the software should do and make the investment decisions (often called “the business”). These names are relics of a bygone age in which IT was considered a cost necessary to improve efficiencies of the business, not a creator of value for external customers by building products and services. These names and the functional separation have stuck in many organizations (as has the relationship between them, and the mindset that often goes with the relationship). Ultimately, we aim to remove this distinction. In high-performance organizations today, people who design, build, and run software-based products are an integral part of business; they are given — and accept — responsibility for customer outcomes. But getting to this state is hard, and it’s all too easy to slip back into the old ways of doing things.