Today, organizations must delight customers, beat competitors to market, and pivot quickly when needed. The increasing rate of change in today’s complex business environment demands more value in less time. And quite often, the ability to deliver quality software quickly and reliably is what drives success in this new world of business value.
In finance, the most innovative banks have developed technology that allows us to deposit and manage money from our smartphones. Apple and Pandora help us discover and purchase music within seconds of release. Successful retailers are finding innovative ways to eliminate friction in the customer experience, allowing us to purchase, make returns, and offer recommendations, all without stepping outside our homes.
When organizations keep up with the velocity of technological change, they possess an undeniable competitive advantage over their peers. And many of these innovative organizations are adopting a DevOps methodology to reach the velocities they need. But this methodology isn’t just about improving technology and revamping processes. Organizational culture plays a critical role in promoting the behaviors required to safely sustain the faster pace.
Birthed out of Agile software development and Lean methodologies, and raised amid tectonic architectural shifts like micro-services, containers, and cloud, the DevOps movement focuses on tools, process, and culture to increase software development and delivery velocity.
The Primary DevOps Challenge
Due to the nature of their work, CIOs and other tech leaders understand what it takes to make an organization a technological innovator. Others, however, still struggle to understand that the ability to deliver a quality product (high-quality code in this case) with speed and stability is at the heart of innovation and customer satisfaction.
Adding further complexity is the fact that many leaders, though they understand the immense impact DevOps can have on their businesses, don’t quite understand where to start with a transformation of this magnitude.
This is largely due to the fact that DevOps Training is not entirely a technology solution. It is also a fundamental shift in the way organizations structure themselves to get work done in a completely new way — a culture shift that challenges the beliefs and assumptions that people hold true about each other, themselves, and their work.
So, how can these organizations begin to understand how they should evolve to stay competitive?