CIOs and DevOps have worked together successfully for a while now. DevOps lets organizations deliver business transformation with the best customer experience. From the smallest organizations to large giants like Capital One, Walmart, Netflix and Target, the industry as a whole has eaten from the DevOps pie. However, the full potential of DevOps is still yet to be unlocked. This is where CIOs need to understand and lead the call for a change in the corporate culture.
Most leaders now understand that institutionalized behavior in consumers cannot be changed. That is perhaps why most CIOs are generally averse to adopting new technologies. But still, CIOs must make the important realization of understanding when technology becomes imperative for survival.
DevOps Works Best in a Learning Culture
A culture conducive to learning is required for DevOps to work the way it should. Then, those who have the right skills should lead to the holistic automation of the entire business process. Most people that meet this challenge will have a definitive edge over their competition.
While it is easy to talk about holistic development through DevOps, a lot has to fall into place for it to happen successfully. At the organizational level, it must start with an assessment. There has to be an audit of the present infrastructure as a well-structured development pipeline. The DevOps team must also recognize the best set of tools for initiating business transformation.
Agile Takes Over Traditional, Linear Thinking
DevOps plays the most significant role in product/solutions based teams. Effective DevOps is about the fusion of development and operations in these teams. Product life cycles totally feed on product teams. Such reorganization takes away the issue of automation being reserved to just product-based silos.
It is imperative that automation will take over a lot of manual computing. Intelligent automation and its adoption across product lifecycles will eradicate human errors, reduce risks and drive enhanced service quality.
Less of Blame, More of Learning
Let’s admit it: whenever something goes wrong at the organizational level, one process is inadvertently made to be the scapegoat. Of course, other measures are also taken to prevent the next failure. In time, the processes pile up, adding tremendous delays as well as layer upon layer of defunct bureaucracy. Resultantly, there’s rarely (if ever) any future value stored in these processes. What follows is less confidence in future DevOps initiatives within the organization.
There has to be a lot of trusts for DevOps to work. The process has to be executed by teams that place trust in one another. Moreover, tasks must be executed together and failure must be used as an opportunity to learn more and drive greater value. In such collaborative environments, production failures will lead to a change in codes and automated testing schedule.
The whole point of placing such safeguards is ensuring that mistakes are not repeated. Plus, production changes are delivered well in time so that there is rapid rollback or resolution in the event of a failure. This process helps build a foundation for learning from past mistakes. Moreover, it also promotes an atmosphere conducive to learning through the whole organization.
Automation Silo Replacement
There is no running away from automation in Industry 4.0. And it has to happen at every stage of the life cycle of business transformation. At the moment, automation only exists within processes. It has only lately begun to work across different processes. The lack of automation affects knowledge management as well as the automation of handoffs.
Once human intervention and manual data processing are brought down significantly, process speeds will increase. Let’s say the operations team gets more performance management data and yet finds it difficult to share it with the development team. An automated feedback loop shall ensure that development teams receive the required information quickly. This way, any unforeseen event will affect the minimum number of customers.
Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment is the new benchmark through different stages of app development. The major stages that constitute CI/CD framework involve continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment.
With the CI/CD model, organizations can derive maximum output from DevOps integration. The CI/CD pipeline does away with a substantial amount of collaborative woes of development and operations teams.
