DevOps and digital transformation: What's the diff?
Many organizations budget for digital transformation cross-functionally and assume DevOps is just an IT project. For example, a study by F5 of almost 2,200 IT executives and industry professionals found that only **one in five surveyed** think DevOps had a strategic impact on their organization despite increasing adoption of DevOps practices. The same study found that **only 17 percent** identified DevOps as key, well below software as a service (42 percent), big data (41 percent) and public cloud infrastructure as a service (39 percent).
This made me wonder: Is DevOps just another fad that's failed to deliver on its original promise? Not so fast!
Is your organization starting a new initiative around automating and monitoring processes of software integration, testing, deployment, and infrastructure changes? Is the goal to build an environment where building, testing, and releasing software can happen rapidly, frequently, and more reliably? Your CIO has probably defined this as your digital transformation initiative or 2020 vision. This is all DevOps! Whatever you call it, the principles remain the same: bringing disparate teams together, aligning their incentives and purposes around the goals of the business, and aligning software delivery and infrastructure management processes so they're compatible, not at odds.
In fact, digital transformations are usually accomplished by enacting DevOps principles in an organization, whether people call them that or not. You will notice the statistics mentioned above are all “things.” SaaS, big data analysis, infrastructure; all things that someone can buy and obtain. From the very beginning digital transformation has start with people and organizational culture. The ability to make things run smoother and automate things to make humans more efficient. DevOps is (or can be) that ideal starting point. Add this together with improving the technology people use everyday and you get yourself a total digital transformation with a rocket propelled start! Let's look at what DevOps is, and why it's such a help in bringing about digital transformation.
DevOps is more than just tools and processes
DevOps, from its start, has always been about culture. DevOps is about creating an environment that fosters communication and organizational change within the business. These are things you build with people! DevOps principles demand strong interdepartmental communication, team-building, and employee engagement activities. There isn’t a device that someone can drop in front of teams that foster those relationships. The tools we adopt enable us to do great things, but when we forget about the people, process, and politics behind the screen, DevOps fails. Once we decide on the process, culture, and have a plan that works for your teams, legendary changes begin to occur.
When the culture is right, the tools begin to fit even better. Capitalize on the innovation and cost-saving opportunities offered by tool sets for traditional IT functions. Operations and automation will continue to blend into a singular entity that drives better software faster. More importantly, by having more clarity into the approval process for IT, more teams get integration into being more agile and moving faster. In the fast-paced environment, IT Security will need to become leaner and will end up being viewed as a blocker internally. Rather teams will begin enforcing better compliance, collaboration, and communication between all teams.
DevOps (usually) starts to build around a process/workflow in one area of IT. Areas like security, compliance, process improvement, etc. can all benefit from DevOps, however many organizations starting points differentiate. If your organization does not have the processes and tools in place you may not be able to react to customer demands. Adopting DevOps allows you to move safer without sacrificing speed. Just as the 2017 State of DevOps report details, high-performing organizations spend *21 percent less time on unplanned work and rework*, and *44 percent more time on new work*. Last year, we also found that high performers spend 50 percent less time remediating security issues than low performers, and we were able to validate that again this year. These results point to the need to involve security and quality teams in the development process early and often.
The idea that moving faster creates more chaos is a myth and needs to be dispelled. With a proper DevOps framework frequent changes to systems can lead to smaller, less risky changes. This overall leads to a much safer and stable environment in the long term, and mitigates risk. If you can trust the process, adapting to the rapid shifts in the marketplace become even easier.
How DevOps enables digital transformation
DevOps adoption is critical to the success of any digital transformation initiative. DevOps consolidates the silos of old-school development, waterfall practices, and “past-due” break-fix and operations teams. DevOps is also the best way to institute cultural and process change while saving money, going faster, and reducing risk. DevOps parallels digital transformation initiatives across the business such as expediting cloud migrations, protecting valuable data in transit, and deploying modern software to employees’ machines faster, cheaper, and more effectively than ever. DevOps enables software to be developed in shorter amounts of time and deployed into production quicker. DevOps requires a new view of organizations and tends to go against the grain of typical IT process, which is why it is sometimes an afterthought or “phase 2” to any digital transformation initiative.
What about the next big thing or rift that can occur? New technologies emerge every day that were not planned for in digital transformation initiatives, but that make our developers, operations, etc. lives better — and drive your security teams nuts. Even more critical is without the right people, process, and technology organizations can miss key insights. For example, if you have missing data points that prevent you from passing an audit due to a lack of knowing what you have. This is a great use case for beginning a DevOps journey and getting started with answering those kinds of questions.
DevOps and digital transformation live in harmony
Digital transformation and DevOps are symbiotic, each depends on the success or survival of the other. Each one lives in the same business ecosystem, but are born in different teams, departments, processes, systems, etc. Achieve both goals by giving champions the ability to bridge DevOps initiatives to the organization's overall transformation to digitally progressive leaders of any industry.
Have you witnessed digital transformation or adoption of DevOps in your organization? Let me know your experiences in the comments!