DevOps Meeting Business Needs: An essential shift for success in IT organizations

DevOps, a very familiar, though not clearly defined, term, in essence, implies the integration of operations and development in the IT space. The concept opposes the traditional scenario where IT operations are separated from development and customers. The contrasting guidelines for development (build the best possible product, use resources to innovate, create new IP) and operations (optimize resources, uptime and system reliability) meant that for the two teams to work well, they needed to be separated.

This need, however, changed with the coming of the cloud, automation, and development methodologies such as Agile. DevOps is an approach that has emerged from lean and agile principles, where business owners, development teams, operations and QA (quality assurance) work together to deliver software in a continuous manner that enables faster response to market opportunities as well as reduced time to respond to customer feedback.

In 2018 State of DevOps report, only around 10% of surveyed organizations rated as Low on the evolutionary scale that determined their progress towards DevOps adoption. The remaining 90% of organizations, spread across a wide range of industries and geographies were at the medium or high level of adoption.

To get an understanding of why DevOps is essential, here’s a calculation from The DevOps Handbook, using Gartner and IDC statistics. In 2011, approximately 5% of worldwide GDP was spent on IT infrastructure. According to the author’s estimate, if 50% of this was allocated as operating and maintenance costs – with one-third being set towards unplanned, urgent work or rework, the amount wasted comes to $520 billion. With DevOps adoption, a conservative estimate is that that waste could be halved, and the remaining gained man-hours utilized in work that adds five times the value – leading to the value creation of $2.6 trillion per year.

In 2018 State of DevOps report, only around 10% of surveyed organizations rated as Low on the evolutionary scale that determined their progress towards DevOps adoption. The remaining 90% of organizations, spread across a wide range of industries and geographies were at the medium or high level of adoption.

Why DevOps?

Which brings us to asking why, and how, DevOps delivers these benefits. According to the Accelerate: State of DevOps 2019 survey, organizations who have embraced DevOps (Elite) and those who are laggards in adoption (Low) show several differences in terms of their software delivery performance –

Source: 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report

The clear-cut differentiation between the delivery lifecycles essentially means faster builds, faster responses to customer requests, fewer service outages and a very low change failure rate. On the whole, elite performers showed –

• 208 times more frequent code deployments
• 106 times faster commit-to-deploy lead times
• 7 times lower change failure rates
• 2604 times faster failure recovery times

The statistics point clearly to organizational excellence. Elite performers are twice as likely to meet or exceed organizational performance goals as compared to low performers (over 100% more likely!). These goals include standard performance statistics such as profitability, productivity, market share, customer count, operating efficiency, customer satisfaction, and quality, among others.

DevOps’ key benefits can be encapsulated in these points –

• Enhanced customer experience – DevOps helps organizations listen and respond quickly to customer feedback, to be agile and adapt to customer demands. Better customer response leads to customer loyalty and increases market share.
• Improved capacity to innovate – DevOps allows a reduction in time invested in activities such as routine maintenance and setup of systems, allowing employees to spend time on more value-adding activities such as R&D and innovation. Also, DevOps allows the faster setup of environments for development and testing, making not the only time available for innovation, but also increase the pace of implementation of innovation.
• Faster time to value – With DevOps, software releases are faster, more efficient, predictable and successful (with much lower critical failure rates). This brings in value much faster to the organization and ensures quicker ROI.

According to Harvard Business Review’s Competitive Advantage through DevOps study, 39% of respondents, most of who are regular HBR subscribers, have not yet adopted DevOps – and this cuts across organizations of all sizes (from 500 to 10,000+ employees). This may be because not all deployments are successful. Only a tenth of those surveyed claimed mastery and achieved goals over the deployment and release cycle post-implementation.

For organizations that fall under this umbrella

The benefits of adoption are clear – Speed to market (70%), productivity (67%), customer relevance (67%), innovation (66%) and product/service quality (64%) were all cited as clear benefits by DevOps adopters. When the pros so far outweigh the cons, the percentage of non-adopters is bound to decrease.

Clearly, DevOps is an approach that is set to change performance parameters for all enterprises. By adopting DevOps, organizations can improve the time they spend on new, value-creating work by 60%. With the enormity of the benefits that DevOps adoption yields it would be detrimental to business success to ignore its implementation any longer. DevOps is mainstream today, and the only way to succeed in today’s automation driven marketplace.

DevOps is a concept- a cultural change- that necessitates deep involvement of the upper management and can be quite challenging without a clear roadmap defined by business leaders. But the challenges to adoption (lack of SMEs, need for understanding of the methodologies, tools, and techniques) must and can be overcome for a successful DevOps journey (more of this in our next article).