Impact of Common Platforms in an Agile Enterprise

In a recent conversation about implementing Agile and DevOps in an organization, our group stumbled into the the question of “Common Platforms” – more specifically, “are common platforms (Tools, technologies, architectures, solutions) helpful or detrimental to a team’s agility in an Agile operating environment?”. There were plenty of opinions in the room — as seems to be the case these days with any discussion related to Agile and DevOps — and the general opinion of the group was that common platforms would constrain a team’s ability to innovate quickly and are fundamentally antithetic to the principles of Agile. On the surface, this position seems rather puristic in nature and seem to ignore the practical operational trade-offs an organization needs to make in order to meet many of its conflicting/competing priorities.

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