DevOps - one of the most powerful weapons in your CIO arsenal

Development and operations (DevOps) may be one of the most powerful weapons you have in your CIO arsenal, fundamentally altering how people work together to deliver business transformation. (Forrester).

If you’re new to the concept of DevOps it is best described as “A set of practices and cultural changes delivering the ideation, development, and delivery of an automated software pipeline, enabling organisations to deliver continuous quality innovation for their customers.” (DevOps: The CIO’s Guide To Velocity” Forrester report)

A DevOps transformation can be one of the most valuable strategic initiatives to build a high-performance organisation. It can encourage innovation and collaboration for continuous learning and deliver strategies that drive growth. As any leader knows, business transformation is the toughest of all management challenges. Organisations need to eradicate traditional thinking and develop the ability for continuous deployment. Sounds simple, but many businesses struggle with getting the right support and buy-in from an exec level. This struggle also impacts the ability for a business to automate processes to allow for increased speed and agility. 

DevOps culture embraces concepts like the Lean and Agile imperative of taking a "fail fast and learn" attitude. Many businesses find that it's difficult to shift their culture - it requires executive leadership and need the right metrics, incentives, and encouragement in place. 

There are many factors that go into a successful DevOps function. Here are the top three factors we’ve found that are critical to making DevOps a successful reality. 

1. culture must transition from individual ownership of a tech silo approach to one of collaboration and communication across the complete ecosystem.
2. put in place appropriate business metrics to allow employees to understand how their work contributes to business outcomes and provides value to external customers. (Forrester)
3. adopt product-centric teams to encourage collaboration, make information sharing easy and maintain a customer focus

Fundamentally, DevOps is about increasing the velocity of building, testing and releasing applications. Therefore, a top culture change is to embrace a "fail fast, fail forward" mentality. Dev and Ops professionals can't be scared of "breaking things in production"?, as speed is vital. This culture change requires the ability to detect emerging production problems rapidly (fail fast), using an APM solution, and to garner feedback on what went wrong in order to improve future release quality (fail forward). John Rakowski, Director of Technology Strategy, AppDynamics.

 Considering a DevOps approach and need help resourcing your team with the right people? 

Call Darren on 0410 321 178 or email [email protected].

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