Welcome to our second installment in our mini-series on DevOps for Business Leaders. Today we are going to talk about why DevOps is important for your organization. If you haven't already done so, we highly recommend reading our first installment of DevOps for Business Leaders: What is DevOps.
In our last post, we talked about DevOps being made up of three things: Mindset, Culture, and Process/Tools. Today we will talk a bit more about why it is important to every organization in the 21st century and why embracing all 3 pillars of DevOps mentioned here are so important.
Why is DevOps Important to an organization?
In today's world, every company is a technology company. The global pandemic over the last year has expedited the need for organizations to be more nimble, to adapt quickly, and to rely on technology in order to succeed in a rapidly changing market landscape. Organizations that are stuck operating in 20th-century business models have been and will continue to be left behind if they do not adapt.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
— Charles Darwin
The concept of DevOps represents the enablement of change in an organization. The better an organization is at incorporating automation, measurement, learning, optimization, and continuous flow into everything your organization does internally, the better prepared it will be to handle and adapt to external changes. With disruption so prevalent in every market, there is a critical demand for speed of change. In order for organizations to achieve this, we need both discipline and guardrails. DevOps frameworks provide the foundation of a successful organization operating in a 21st-century business model. The DevOps culture enables businesses to streamline value delivery to customers by leveraging automation, removing silos, and fostering collaboration across the organization.
Challenges Incorporating DevOps in an Organization
We all know implementing DevOps isn't something that's going to happen overnight. In most organizations, the biggest blocker to a successful DevOps rollout is not the technology, it's the people and their mindsets rooted in a culture that does not support these ideologies.
Gartner predicts that through 2022, 75% of DevOps initiatives will fail to meet expectations due to issues around organizational learning and change.
People-related factors tend to be the greatest challenges — not technology
- Gartner
Embracing DevOps from the top-down and aligning your organization around a framework like SAFe which enables a customer-centric DevOps mindset is key to a successful implementation.
To sum it up
DevOps is important to your organization because:
- Your organization is relying on technology to deliver value to customers.
- Your organization cannot effectively respond to the rapidly changing market landscape without embracing DevOps.
- Your organization cannot effectively deliver a constant stream of value to customers without embracing DevOps.
- DevOps needs to be embraced at the organization level or the teams who try to build it will be continually blocked.
Interested in continuing the conversation? We would love to talk to you!