How Does DevOps Promote Digital Transformation ?
NOTE: Acronym DT used in this article refers to Digital Transformation. Happy reading !
The purpose of any business is to keep their customers satisfied, by increasing the value they deliver in their products or services, as well as improving the end-user experience ( both customers and employees). Obviously, we live in an age where technology is the base for growth and competitveness, thus Digital Transformation became a priority for the majority of businesses if not all of them.
In fact, in a matter of few months, the COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the process of adopting digital technologies by several years and has shifted the way companies in all sectors do business now. This could be through offering improved on-demand training, migrating data to cloud services, leveraging artificial intelligence, and more.
If we look more closely on what Digital Transformation represents, we see that it is a combination of three areas:
- Customer experience: it refers to personalizing the user experience and understanding their needs and interacting with them whenever, however they require. This calls for agility and flexibility.
- Operational processes: this invloves improving internal processes by preventing internal wastes of people and tools, by enhancing automation, and collecting data to monitor performance to make data-driven decisions.
- Business models: transforming the business by introducing digital tools , and using technology to provide global shared services.
Whereas there are numerous technologies businesses use to enable Digital Transformation, one of its vital drivers remain less known when associated to DT, and that is DevOps.
Therefore, the question we will be answering in this article is how to successfully promote Digital Transformation using DevOps ?
DevOps falls right into place in response to business digitalization as it combines between people, process, and technology. In fact, there isn’t a single way to DevOps, it is not a software you download or a product you can buy, it is rather based on culture and leadership and is focused on transforming your people, your process and your technology to create value to the customer.
Generally, the technical word of DevOps stands for Development ( the staff that write code) and Operations ( the staff that handle information technology operations such as managing the computer systems ). Nevertheless, it is not a simple procedure of adding a DevOps engineer to your team or asking systems administrators and developers to play well together.
To define DevOps, experts have come up with an easy accronym to explain it: C.A.L.M.S
- The letter C stands for Culture. First and foremost , the cultural change to DevOps requires teamwork, all disciplines are working together whether in crisis or daily operations ( developers, QA architects, project managers. Working in teams calls for respecting unique skillsets of each team or each discipline in the organization.
- The letter A refers to Automation, to repeatedly automating activities that are redundant
- The Letter L stands for Lean and that is by applying lean principles to IT ( please refer the this article to know more about Lean IT)
- The letter M stands for Metrics and it refers to feedback loops , to make sure the organization is measuring progress ( measuring customer usage, measuring what is wrong..).
- The letter S stands for Sharing: to install continuous learning within the organization, the idea is to share while learning rather than just collect data and not use it in the feedback loop mentioned earlier.
Back to how can DevOps contribute to DT , importantly, it encourages organizations to comprehend their systems as well as their models by increasing flow, supporting continuous learning and experimentation in order to increase their performance and change in the aspect of digital vision.
DevOps also prevents the internal waste of people and tools by applying Lean principles, which allows more focus on innovation and liberate more resources that were wasted on lower priorities of the organization. Hence, delivering new products to the customer in a fast pace.
Another important role of DevOps in driving DT is providing a faster time to market, thanks to automation of infrastructure processes, testing, and deployment, a release of a software can take minutes instead of hours or even days. In addition that it eliminates the uncertainty of manual configuration and treaceability since all modifications are made from version control. In fact, it makes the IT base of an organization more flexible, dynamic and on-demand, thus clients demand can be met within the deadline they fix.
DevOps has formed a focal point throughout which businesses can develop their digital transformation plans by enhances the three main areas of DT cited earlier in the beginning of this article. Although DevOps is not easy to adopt within an organization, promoting Digital Transformation without it, is practically preposterous.
Thus, it is recommended to organizations to establish corporate training sessions for DevOps , to understand what are the best practices, and to start preparing for the transition to DevOps in a successful way to get the most out of the methodology.
References used in this article are cited below:
https://itsocial.fr/enjeux-it/enjeux-production/devops/comprendre-modele-calms-applique-a-devops/
https://whatfix.com/digital-transformation/
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