Continuous implementation of new functions, processes or tooling
With digitalisation making IT and digital investments increasingly important, it has been harder and harder for IT departments to keep up with business requirements for more and quicker additions of new digital capabilities and functionality. In today’s businesses, digital capabilities are almost always vital to the business and to keep up with competition.
Organisations need to continuously implement new functions, processes or tooling.
This happens at the same time as new ways of doing business, means that organisations need to be cost efficient and do things efficiently to stay competitive. Often meaning that companies can not afford to increase IT budgets they would need to meet all the requirements from the business.
The situation is something that recently has been referred to as the ”IT delivery gap”. Which refers to the difference in IT budget and delivery capacity versus the requirements of the organisation.
Using DevOps to solve the IT delivery gap
DevOps has started to move from something that was originally termed by Developers and Operations staff, that wanted to shorten the cycle from development to production using both technical tooling and new ways to cooperate (reference our DevOps Ready Model), into being something that decision makers have started to look at as a phenomenon that can help bridge the IT delivery gap.
In a recent study performed by MuleSoft (The 2019 Connectivity Benchmark report) about 1,000 decision makers within IT was surveyed on their priorities and focus areas for the near future. Close to 50% of these decision makers mentioned DevOps as a mean of reducing the IT delivery gap.
To us this comes as a little bit of a surprise, as we through our own survey performed together with Radar Group in 2016, found that less than 10% of Nordic IT decision makers thought that DevOps would be an important part of their digital transformation journeys (in the same survey, 50% of the surveyed decision makers said that increased demands from the business was their main concern. This means that the IT delivery gap was very much on the rise already then.
Why has this changed and why are IT decision makers turning to DevOps to solve the IT delivery gap?
DevOps makes IT more efficient
The answer to the questions raised above is that by using a DevOps methodology the right way, you will make your IT organisation more efficient. Where organisations started to look at DevOps to make developers and operations work tighter together from the beginning to solve operational issues, they now turn to DevOps methodology to make the whole development and deploy process more efficient.
This basically means to go faster from requirement to deploy. By doing this IT organisations hope to increase efficiency in deliveries and consequently decrease the gap between IT budgets/capacity and business expectations. So – is this something that can be done or is it just decision makers turning to a new phenomenon to solve their headaches?
Of course there is no simple yes or no answer to this question. It is true that when implementing a DevOps methodology your IT delivery, maintenance and operations will be more efficient (there are a lot of studies that gives evidence of this) and as a consequence of this, time and budget can be spent on innovation and development instead.
So – in this context it is true that implementing a DevOps methodology may free up resources to let you spend more effort on development and innovation, rather than just spending your resources on ”keeping the lights on”.
A successful implementation of a DevOps methodology and process can also make your development and deploy process more efficient, which will make it possible to go faster from requirement to production. All these things will work with you in freeing up resources to decrease the ”IT delivery gap”, but will it be enough to satisfy your business owners?
Probably not – new requirements tend to emerge quicker than you can say ”resources”. However, combining a successful implementation of a DevOps methodology paired with information self-service through APIs, flexible access to computing power and a micro-services based architecture to decrease dependencies will certainly take you a long way in creating an IT environment for innovation and agility.
Certainly this will give you a better position to meet the IT delivery gap.
More information on our take on: DevOps, Connectivity and Cloud adoption
