DevOps stands for breaking through the Dev and Ops silos and aligning the goals of these two different parts of an organization. It’s actually always been a name for what we’re trying to do, which is breaking silos and thinking in value streams rather than technical expertise. And there’s actually more than only Dev and Ops.
Highlights
- Breaking through silos and thinking in value streams requires more than just Dev and Ops: an integrated approach.
- New initiatives, such as DevSecOps and BizDevOps, are emerging more and more.
- Cultural and behavioral change within organizations is at least as important as technology.
The history of DevOps
“DevOps in the Enterprise”, or “DevOps at Scale,” has a history as long as DevOps itself. While the benefits of DevOps are well understood and significant productivity and speed gains have been achieved by organizations of all sizes, these benefits have not been widely realized when implemented in large organizations.
Many organizations worked on local optimizations to help individuals and teams develop, test and deploy their code better and faster. For example, teams were
created to manage the organization’s DevOps tooling. This organization-specific approach also resulted in faster and more organization-specific obstacles, which
made DevOps not really successful.
An integrated approach is required
DevOps is increasingly becoming an integrated approach to business operations. Why? The use of DevOps adds value to organizations. DevOps insights helps in bridging the gap between development and operations. But the need to improve goes beyond development and operations. Adaptability, the incorporation of quality and thus continuous coordination, and integration from the business domain, security, architecture, data and external suppliers are also required. This means that the value stream (value chain in the entire production process) will
become increasingly leading.
BizDevOps
You can see that more and more new initiatives are emerging, such as DevSecOps and BizDevOps. BizDevOps bridges the gap between business and DevOps. More cooperation during the development cycle leads to a quick and efficient result, with much more added value for the business. These terms indicate that an integrated approach is crucial for success.
Driven by value streams
This is driven by the end user: the organization is dealing with a customer who goes through the process and the organization has to deliver something at the end. IT management often struggles to keep up with end-user demands for speed, quality and availability. Only an integrated approach, in which organizing the right processes, technology and new ways of working are stated, will bring success.
Impact on People, Processes and Technology
Within DevOps transformations, there is often a lot of focus on technology. But culture and behavioral change are at least as important when it comes to creating high-performance teams.
More focus on cultural change
There will be more focus on optimizing the processes and the cultural change that is the basis for improving the performance of organizations. A DevOps trajectory itself can therefore also be a multidisciplinary trajectory. The various experts learn from each other and new insights will pop up through cross-pollination.
The focus on technology is becoming more and more unnecessary
DevOps has never really been a technological change. The emphasis has often been on technological change, but the intention has always been to deliver value. Of course, automation and Continuous Delivery are important to achieve this, but certainly not the goal in itself. Now that DevOps is being used more widely, this is becoming increasingly important. The technology has reached a certain level or standard so that all attention no longer has to go there. This makes it possible to really pursue the goal of DevOps.
Conclusion
This trend will only continue in the future. For an effective deployment and use of DevOps, a total vision of the value stream is necessary. Around this, teams are formed that have everything in-house to help the customer in that area. DevOps is therefore much more than processes and technology; for the success of DevOps in organizations it is important to make the link with the organizational dimension (performance factor) and the behavior and attitude dimension (people factor).
