Business people should start thinking about DevOps

If you are asking yourself why your business people should start thinking about DevOps, here is the reason why:The world is changing. To survive and grow, your company must go digital.

So, what is digitalization?

The first and most important reason for digitalization is the evolving customer behavior and preferences. When you are looking to buy something, the first thing you do is a search on Google, right? Next, you browse through the search results, and eventually you place an order. Fewer and fewer times, you're actually driving to a shop. By example, a Dutch retailer: Blokker missed the digital boat and is now closing about one third of its shops, and has to lay off 300 people.

The second reasons are growth opportunities and new markets. If until yesterday you were limited by physical presence, today the world is one global village. With a few clicks you can select and order almost any product from anywhere. Is digitalization not a unique opportunity to enter new markets?

New regulatory standards and compliancy might not be the primary reason, but DevOps is more then just developing and deploying in an agile way. Software development and deployment is a business process like any other and needs to follow rules. Regulation and compliancy demands fully documented, repeatable processes and insight on who authorized what and when.

Competitive pressure: the example of the Dutch retailer shows that if you don’t do it, somebody else will. Increased competitive pressure will force you to follow.

 

Digitalization and DevOps

We all know that IT budgets are not increasing and the business expects us to derive business value more quickly in these highly complex environments and with improved quality. This means that, to meet these digital economy demands, we must not only focus on just improving the IT operational efficiencies to enable business innovation, but also provide superior customer experience with continuous deployment and improved software practices.

To achieve this we should ask ourselves following questions:

  • How do we become more agile to deliver a better customer experience?
  • How do we successfully deliver a greater volume of high-quality and innovative products and services?
  • How can we achieve all of this and manage it with less budget?

Well DevOps is the answer. Companies that are implementing DevOps are realizing that it brings more speed and agility across the application life cycle to become more customer focused, allowing the delivery of customer-demanded functionality faster, with higher levels of quality and security.

Although understanding the value of DevOps for digital transformation is key, we need to understand that for a successful DevOps adaptation we need to overcome barriers around skills, culture change, and legacy IT process mindset to accelerate DevOps adoption.

A McKinsey report clearly shows that IT priorities have shifted. Efficiency, quality, reliability and security are not only in higher demand but are consolidated with time as key priority.

 

 

What's next

Stay tuned for my next post, where I will talk about what DevOps really is about in layman's terms.

Picture of Rene De Vleeschauwer

About the author

Hello, my name is René De Vleeschauwer.

Throughout my career I've been responsible for the development of enterprise software. Since 12 years I've been leading the development of IKAN ALM, an open DevOps framework.

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