I just posted a blog rant about some of the responses I just read @ http://blog.kevinbehr.com/ Over the last 10 years Gene Kim and I ( @RealGeneKim on twitter) have done countless hours of research in to high performing IT shops and what it takes to turn around those that aren't performing well. I can tell you that much of the high performers success hinges on the detailed specification of work and all of it's implicit assumptions.

highly technical people will kill us all with their highly technical mistakes. It has been proven adnasuem that 80% of all IT outages are caused (yes this is real research from Gartner and many others) by "highly technical" IT staff not by security breaches or equipment failure...you have to manage the changes if you want to have stability. hmm..wonder why all of the best in class shops live and die by their change management programs. I have worked with shops that handle thousands of servers with just a handful of sysadmins because of their amazing change management programs. Just because some shops (read most) don't understand how to make change management work correctly doesn't mean process is evil. After building several IT organizations with server to sysadmin rations north of 150:1 I became a complete convert. I will say that if you have have bad change management it is better to have none. But if you have no (or ineffective) change management you are spending way too much time fire-fighting and not enough time doing the preventive work neccesary to keep things up. I wonder why most serious shops with any retail exposure ban most changes during the holiday season?? (hint: so their availability numbers go through the roof and they can cash in on all of the sales)