Human transformation is essential for digital transformation. But what about pandemic? Any transformation implies a strategy change with the goal to bring an organization from where it is to where it wants to be. The pandemic has shifted the Devops more to the left with greater challenges. The transformation to digital business was accelerated in 2020 by the worldwide pandemic, which changed the speed at which digital services were made available. According to McKinsey’s study in July 2020, 899 C-level and senior executives reported that they moved 20 to 25 times faster than they thought possible on implementing online Purchasing/services for their customers.
So, what made such acceleration?
Business priorities:
Digital services were never the business priorities before the pandemic. Transitioning to digital services, became essential for ongoing business operations. Organizations had to create digital services almost overnight to cope with the business demands. Key activities consistent with the priorities of keeping employees, customers, and partners safe while continuing operations and service revenues had to be pursued while other activities had been tossed. Resource allocation and funding happened immediately. This paved the way for more consistent and continuing performance of business activities.
Outmaneuver with organizational barriers and issues:
The required changes towards digital services represented too big of a shock for the established ways of working before the pandemic. Existing budgeting processes. Resource allocation and approval processes that translate priorities into activities had to respond to the new situation quickly. This rapid action has enforced the organization to work in faster way. Different ways of operating were needed, including how to utilize organizations’ resources such as people, money, and time. All had to be short-circuited. Activities that kept the business’s delivery of its priorities alive were essential.
Technical issues as excuse:
In many IT enterprises, technical debt, legacy or insufficient IT infrastructures, tight budgets for resources, shortage of skills, and people caused transformation challenges. Additionally, existing organizational silos impeded commitment to and execution of required and necessary changes to run, grow or transform the business. With the immediate need to shift the workforce to work from home, collaboration technologies, security capabilities and cloud platforms became essential to support this changed working model.
The DevOps Evolution Continues Strong despite pandemic:
- DevOps shifting left.
- Security is integral; welcome to DevSecOps.
- Cloud models such as PaaS, IaaS require intelligent automation.
- Pressure continues to force old IT operating models to change.
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are adding value.
- New models such as DataOps and ModelOps are showing up.
- Value Stream Management keeps rising in importance.
- SRE continues its adoption journey.
Three key challenges which hamper DevOps evolution within your organization:
- The excessive layers of anxious middle management which stand between ideas and their execution
- Pathologically siloed organizational structures with no history of or incentives to engage in collaboration
- Senior-level executives who are not able, willing, or skilled to lead digital disruption in the company.
Some good news despite the Covid-19 Crises-
But there is some good news, despite COVID-19. In a survey conducted by PwC across more than 10 countries in Europe, 84% rated the overall IT performance in response to COVID-19 as good or very good. Additional IT budgets will stay the same or only show a small decline for 2021to 22. New investments in IT infrastructure, network capabilities, cloud, security, and the velocity and quality of development of software in support of digital services will be easier to justify. This will shift IT to the forefront as digital services are essential for the continuation of business operations.
The demand for faster, secure, quality digital services and applications to continue to increase customers, clients, or patients’ experience puts a spotlight on existing application delivery and IT operations teams. They need to ensure that their work is in lockstep to support the digital transformation of their organization.
This has driven the adoption of DevOps and some other operating models and will continue to do so post pandemic.
In our next content we will discuss about DevOps Life cycle phases and how it works… till then happy reading….