In my experience, though, the term is originating out of ops groups, however, not dev groups. I think ops people are more frustrated, if anything, with the current generally slow response from ops teams.

I think there are two major axes of confusion regarding the term.

One is the differentiation between the (IMO) larger concept of Agile Operations and DevOps specifically. I wrote a somewhat lengthy post on how I see the larger Agile Operations term breaking down, in a way completely parallel to agile development.

Two is the lack of differentiation of the different roles within system administration – there’s the up front systems engineering of designing the system and then there’s the release, and then the post-release job of operational support. I think “DevOps” tends to assume all three of these items within “Ops” but it needs to be called out more – in a sufficiently large organization these are three different roles! Our DBA team here has a bunch of different sub-groups, the “production support DBAs,” the “release DBAs,” the “project DBAs,” and the “architect DBAs”…

In closing, I don’t think that ITIL and agile are opposed at all. Sure, when people do agile, either development or operations, sloppily, they forget certain quality steps. However, real agile development, with its test-driven focus, tries to enhance and not abandon testing, performance, security, etc. Similarly, I think agile operations is about how to put in all the needed checks without requiring months to do it. And I think that’s possible. In fact, read Visible Ops (Behr, Kim, Spafford), a book popular among DevOps – they prescribe a phased ITIL implementation and have research showing that top performers that have these processes in place are actually able to accomplish a much higher throughput of changes than ones that don’t. In other words, control vs agility is a false dichotomy, based on doing control wrong.