Reuniting IT Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops): A study on the merger of two opposite organizational logics in the self-organizing era, from an identity perspective

Sammanfattning: Agile working methods gain in popularity among practitioners within the IT (Information Technology) industry and beyond, as a result of the revival of the self-organizing team as a mode for organizing work in contemporary organizations. The talk of DevOps, as an agile method which merges opposite organizational logics, IT Development (Dev) and IT Operations (Ops), into a self-organizing team, has arisen as a management fashion. Following interpretative research traditions and an abductive study approach, our purpose is to enhance the understanding of the ‘hard-to-grasp’ phenomena of individual and group identity in organizational change. In addition, the contemporary ‘self-organizing era’ calls for a consideration of group identity in change processes, which appeared to be understudied. A large Dutch financial institution, referred to as The Bank, currently adopting DevOps working methods served as a single case-study. Our rich empirical descriptions show how the radical merger of two opposite logics cause identity issues for the individual – employee and team lead – as well as on the group level. By complementing the discursive framework of organizational changing by Jian (2011), we underpin our thesis that group identity has become equally or even more salient than organizational identity. By extension of the framework by Alvesson & Willmott (2002) of identity regulation, we show how identity is ‘softly’ regulated on the individual and group level, in order to align the ‘self-organizing’ swarm with overarching organizational objectives.