Operations versus development. In a lot of IT organisations these could not be more divided. I have written about that elsewhere (in Dutch though). Operations typically considers every change request as a disruption. Change are the root cause of most problems and outages.
A friend of mine sent me a presentation, from Velocity 09. This describes how Flickr runs its operations and development together. The presenters list a couple of technical and cultural measures to take. I won’t list them here, if you are remotely interested in this topic you should watch it yourself.
What I found the most interesting underpinning principle is this. Operations (and development) should support the business. The business requires change. Therefore operations and development should work together to reduce the risk of change.
It is this mindset that enables more productive discussions between these two groups. At Flickr this enables 10 deploys per day, where most organisations consider a quarterly release as frequent.