ISG Momentum® Strategic Perspectives - The Essentials of Scaling DevOps
Drawing Parallels with the Manufacturing Industry
Several years back manufacturers realized that the further a product got on the manufacturing line, the less the production operator knew what had happened earlier. This led to longer time to repair, higher inventory, wasted time, low production quality and an inability to innovate. It was manufacturers that realized that the people who are going to operate the manufacturing line need to be part of the other functions, such as the design, architecture and development, and vice versa. This ensures that the manufacturing line is designed for operations and operated for design improvements. When manufacturers deployed this concept their defect rates plummeted, quality went up, and the speed and ability to get ideas for improvement or even a new product from the drafting table to the assembly line dramatically increased.
Years later, IT experts realized that these powerful concepts can also work in the software development environment. Over the last few years companies of all sizes have turned to DevOps practices and have adopted various tools, techniques and technologies to increase agility, speed to market and quality through combining the software development and information technology operations practices.
IT organizations commonly establish DevOps with a focus on the tools and technologies related to this combination and that support of rapid deployment cycles, without a clear appreciation or focus on the techniques and the cultural change that truly enable DevOps. They create and execute one or two pilot projects to demonstrate the success with DevOps tools, and tools alone can certainly help the development and deployment cycle (continuous integration and deployment automation are common). After a successful pilot project, in many cases the leadership quickly decides to use DevOps across all technology teams with the support of these latest tool and automation techniques. However, despite the enthusiasm, using DevOps tools does not guarantee a successful scaling across the organization. Most often IT executives fail to realize the challenges they will come across when they choose to scale DevOps.
DevOps success is not just about the use of tools – some of the key issues that need to be addressed to ensure a successful DevOps practice are the functional hierarchy, lack of collaboration between multiple technology and business disciplines, cultures and individuals, the legacy infrastructure and deeply coupled architectures.
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