A customer recently told me that explaining to his boss why they desperately needed the Interwoven Composite Application Provisioning (CAP) solution reminded him of how hard it would have been to sell a dishwasher to a housewife in the 1940’s.  After my initial laugh, I realized he was spot on.  I could just imagine trying to explain to a woman who has been washing dishes by hand just has her mother and grandmother had done, why it’s better to have a machine that not only washes, but sanitizes and dries.  Who knows, maybe even her husband could now get in on the act! 

It sounds silly to us now, considering there is a dishwasher in almost every house, but getting someone to admit their manual ways need a tune up is harder than it looks.  I have been collecting release stories for the past 4 years and I am always amazed at the hoops these IT Operations guys jump through just to update code and content to their custom Web or composite applications. 

It varies from company to company, but generally every Thursday after the rest of the business has left for the day, downstairs the IT group is having their weekly release party.  Don’t feel left out if you haven’t received an invitation, it sounds a lot more fun than it really is.  These deployment or release “parties” generally happen after hours, well after hours and the activities are far less fun than bobbing for apples, playing spin the tail on the donkey or eating cake. 

All week, IT operations and/or the change and release team has been gathering up all the changes thrown over the wall from development.  These changes can be new applications, code changes, content changes or configuration files and they live in various systems within development.  While developers have well established tools for creating, versioning and editing code and content, IT operations is not using a standardized tool, they are using spreadsheets, FTP and manual process. 

During this deployment party, a group of dedicated individuals is manually copying and moving changes through QA, pre-prod and production, and then painstakingly checking line after line of code to ensure changes are accurate and synchronized across all tiers and all servers. 

In a fairly commoditized Web market, it’s almost unthinkable that there is no tool or solution to assist this group in their custom application provisioning.  IT has tools for provisioning operating systems to new servers, for provisioning patches and updates.  Developers have tools for creating and updating code and business contributors have tools for creating and editing content, but this poor group of change and release management is stuck using home-grown FTP and ANT scripts to update and ensure the accuracy of the world’s largest Web applications.  As the business side of the house requires more and more responsiveness to market changes, applications are becoming more and more customized.  As this customization increases, I wonder how long IT can rely on manual processes and weekly releases. 

There is a great need from the business to increase the number and frequency of releases, however, there is no way IT could increase their deployment parties from once a week without hiring an entire new team.  And that is not all; most companies are seeing a need to not only increase from once a week, but they are requesting multiple changes a day.  This is a scary thought to those who know what it takes to get changes out to a multi-tiered transactional environment.  It sounds like the business is starting to ask questions and the IT answers are not looking pretty. 

Just like our antiquated housewife, IT needs a machine that will not only get their releases out automatically, but provide a full audit trail, graphical reporting, scheduled workflow, deployment and rollback, whole application versioning and transactional capabilities.  IT needs to get back to what matters instead of babysitting releases, they need a standardized change and release management solution for custom Web or composite applications.

What I’m trying to say is…..I can’t imagine living life without a dishwasher and some day I hope these IT operation folks will say I can’t remember the last release party I went to!