DevOps Not A One-Size-Fits-All Strategy: CA

Source – cxotoday.com

Many IT departments are siloed between development, operations, support, and management, but companies that are using a DevOps system seek to integrate them all for better productivity and a smoother overall workflow. In an exclusive chat with CXOToday, Abhilash Purushothaman, responsible for the overall DevOps Business across India and SAARC region at CA Technologies, said that the key objective is to bring products to market faster, deliver software and security updates more quickly, and make the entire process more reliable. If you combine Agile and DevOps, you get even greater success,” he added.

It is little wonder that today’s fiercely competitive environment that calls for customer satisfaction and brand loyalty, agile and DevOps are driving happier customers and employees.

The numbers back up the claims.The results from a recent CA Technologies global study reveals that advanced users of DevOps realized significant increases of up to 52 percent in customer satisfaction and up to 50 percent in employee productivity.

According to the report, nearly 75 percent of respondents who added DevOps to agile implementations reported improvements in employee recruitment and retention versus 57 percent for Agile-only users.

Purushothaman explains that DevOps is not a tool. Unfortunately, a lot of CIOs think that DevOps is a tool or a piece of software that you can buy. Technically, you cannot buy the philosophy of DevOps that includes an organization’s development and operations functions to work in sync. However, they can use certain tools to implement DevOps.

A collaborative approach

In a DevOps and agile environment, a question that often comes to mind is, who should lead agile and DevOps initiatives: The CIO, CDO or other CXOs. Purushothaman believes, there has been a changing dynamics in this regard. Most of the time the CIO or CTO is trying to develop software development, often neglecting the business side of it. On the other hand, we are also finding a lot of traction with our team, the Chief Digital Officers and the Chief Marketing Officers.

According to him, With digital already underway in organizations and a core part of IT transformation, our conversations have slowly moved to CDOs and CMOs which in turn brings the conversation much closer to business – rather than supporting the business, even though a strong understanding of technology processes are required.

As a suggestion to the CIOs, he said, “To unlock the promise of DevOps, CIOs must lead and support a cultural change within their technology management organization. They must engender a culture of collaboration and learning and enable their people with the right tools to drive holistic life-cycle automation.”

Purushothaman said, “DevOps incorporates a new collaborative culture that embraces numerous practices combined together for a continuous software development methodology that places significant emphasis on feedback loops, collaboration and continuous improvement. DevOps requires fundamental cultural changes and includes so many practices that can be overwhelming to those just starting their journey.”

Where’s the heat?

As DevOps filters into mainstream enterprise IT, its maturity varies according to the business verticals and their markets, starting from heavy regulation in the banking and financial services and life sciences industries to retail and media and entertainment sectors. Other markets, such as healthcare and transportation, face unique cultural challenges and also see the need to have a DevOps mind set to the software development process.

And needless to say, DevOps practices can be more easily adopted in greenfield settings, such as software as a service startups, and the new age ecommerce and mcommerce companies. The future is really bright and the trends are here to stay and will continue to be big in the coming months, stated Purushothaman.

DevOps is not a one-size-fits-all strategy, because there are so many different business drivers and technologies to consider when setting up an overall DevOps adoption strategy and identifying your DevOps tool chain, it’s important to apply the same formula to your DevOps strategy, Purushothaman summed up.