What is a technology department if not a service provider? Essentially, the technology team seeks to enable other areas of the company to deliver more and better results. We can say that what differentiates good technology teams from the best is the agility and adherence with which these services are delivered.
Increasingly, business and technology teams need to work seamlessly, which means we should eliminate the boundaries between “IT responsibility” and “business responsibility.” Team topologies help the joint operation of teams that contain all capabilities; however, functions with more specific hard skills remain somewhat isolated in this context. How do specific skills in Infrastructure, databases, and information security fit within this framework? It is precisely in this sense that these teams need to be more enabling than mere service providers.
Another issue is that it’s often said that technicians should move towards understanding business, but it’s worth reflecting that business teams also need to understand technology. If it’s true that companies are becoming more technological every day, how can we dissociate business decision-makers from the capabilities that technology offers? This doesn’t mean that product managers need to code, but they should know how to recognize the best and fastest ways to implement solutions.
Therefore, in this context, more technical teams should increasingly strive to make what they do more palatable and simpler for business teams because at the end of the day, they’re the ones paying the bill.
Let’s learn from support. Service catalogues have been discussed since the 1980s. The goal has always been to clarify what is done, how it’s requested, what the rules are, and the costs involved. Ideally, ITIL and COBIT already perceive infrastructure, database, and DevOps teams in the same way, but little of this has actually been implemented.
I truly believe that the high infrastructure costs and the skills required from specialized teams will demand greater integration between these more technical teams and the more business-oriented teams, which, in the end, should be one and the same. In this sense, the so-called platform teams will increasingly become providers of intelligible and technology-independent services. Requests and part of the implementation will be made by squad members without the need for direct intervention from the provider, generating more agility and results.
