Research: Exploring the connection between DevOps and digital

Is adopting DevOps a prerequisite for going digital, or a by-product of the digitalisation process?

The road to digital transformation is a well-trodden one, and it's pretty unusual these days to come across an organisation that is not marching down it. From government departments to golf clubs, from media to manufacturing, it's out with the old and in with the new.

In the broadest sense, digital transformation describes the process of connecting people and machines with each other and with the information that they need, when they need it and where they need it, in contrast with the old centralised model.

Digital transformation both requires and instigates new ways of working and it is often driven by the need to find new improved methods of conversing with customers and partners and being more flexible in reacting to their needs and wants. Communication is increasingly important in our consumer-driven, always-on world and flexibility and responsiveness are valuable currencies.

So how do organisations go about amassing these currencies? For many the answer lies in software. Most organisations of any size are now - to a greater or lesser extent - software companies. Software is the way organisations differentiate themselves and it is rare to find a firm of 100-plus staff that does not count a coder somewhere in its ranks.

Where the software produced by companies is a user interface or a mobile app, the quality of the code and the efficiency of its production have an important effect on the public perception of the organisation. So far, so obvious, but even if the only software a company produces is invisible middleware, the ability to update, patch, deliver and apply it quickly and smoothly will still make a lot of difference to customer relations.

Software is important, and growing increasingly more so, and buggy, insecure, outdated applications and utilities just don't cut it any more. Which is where DevOps comes in. By bringing together the developer and operations functions the idea is to remove bottlenecks in production, shorten the production lifecycle and improve quality.

Better quality software delivered more promptly excuses an organisation to walk with a certain swagger as it travels the road to digital transformation.

The close connection between digital and DevOps was certainly backed up by Computing's latest DevOps research among almost 300 organisations that develop software.

Asked how important a DevOps structure is to digital transformation, 65 per cent of respondents to our online poll said it is important, ie rating it five or more on a seven-point scale. In contrast, just 14 per cent rated it three or below (figure 1).

Among organisations that are already bringing the Dev and Ops roles together, these numbers were even more supportive of the link between digital and DevOps, with 72 per cent rating its importance five or above.

Another finding suggestive of a strong connection between digital and DevOps is that those companies that are adopting DevOps are more advanced in terms of digital than the population as a whole. Forty per cent of DevOps adopters describe their organisation as "digital" with another 56 per cent saying they are moving in that direction (figure 2).

There are many parts in motion here: are firms adopting DevOps so they can move towards a more digital future, or are they able to merge the developer and operations functions as a direct result of dispensing with legacy systems and practices?

A senior DevOps engineer in government explained: "You don't need DevOps to be digital, but if you move to digital for your end users, you will move faster if you are agile. You need to be agile to be efficient in digital… To be digital it makes sense to be agile and to be agile it makes sense to be DevOps…"

DevOps is helping larger organisations behave more like smaller ones, he added.

"It was initially the start-ups doing this, but now some of the big companies are catching up because of the competition. In banking, there are some new banks that are completely online that move much faster and get products out much quicker."

On a roll

As we can see in figure 3, there has been an impressive uptick in DevOps uptake over the past 12 months.

Thirteen per cent have merged Dev and Ops functions successfully, up from 10 per cent last year. And there has been a big increase in the number of those setting out on the journey too: 25 per cent compared with 16 per cent in 2015; planning for DevOps is up as well - 20 per cent compared with 13 per cent.

That's a pretty convincing shift in the DevOps direction.

While digital transformation is a broad, long-term business strategy, IT is very much in the driving seat when it comes to DevOps (figure 4). This is not a big surprise as DevOps is all about merging two IT functions together, and as a relatively new idea it probably still lies under the radars of most business leaders.

Ultimately, though, the IT strategy must align with the overall business plan.

"DevOps can be pushed by Dev or by Ops or overall IT, but if it's not supported by a higher business point of view, it won't work…" said our senior DevOps engineer in government.

One reason it won't work without board-level support is that DevOps is a long-term strategy. Even in a small company it can be tricky to push through the cultural changes required, and in a large organisation the problems may be orders of magnitude greater. A large organisation may be distributed across time zones, or it may outsource part or all of its development process or operations. That can make co-ordination a very tricky challenge.

"I have seen it where it is completely distributed, with Dev in Poland, London, India and China. It is tricky, not because of DevOps, it's because of agile. How do you manage agile teams where it's distributed?" asked a consultant.

Meanwhile, simply insourcing development is not without its consequences.

"We outsourced for a reason. It was to be able to flex up and down, the volumes and the speed, to control costs, to implement strict change control…" said a VP of technology solutions in the entertainment sector, indicating some of the factors that need to be taken into consideration if an organisation is to have a structure that is favourable to DevOps.

The high road and the low road

Gartner describes the co-existence of two forms of IT - the agile, customer-facing, DevOps-style type and the slower moving, traditional, big systems type - as "bi-modal IT". This is where most organisations find themselves as they move to a more decentralised structure, and for many firms bi-modal IT will be the final destination of their journey (figure 5). Indeed, for a sizable 45 per cent of our respondents bi-modal IT was seen as an end in itself.

Looking at the people delivering the changes, for software development and production the most popular vision was to have a fairly loose structure, a pool of resources and expertise to bring together when needed. Just after that came an official DevOps team and after that a range of DevOps teams, each aligned to a certain business unit or application.

Whatever the model chosen, the fact that it will likely take five or 10 years to bed in means that DevOps should be introduced gradually as an integral part of the digital transformation itself. For IT leaders it is important to explain the changes clearly and to take as many people with them as possible. Fortuntately, unlike some other employees, technologists are generally embracing of change.

"IT people are keen to learn new skills, so it's a matter of selling it to your IT department, repackaging existing skills into new ones," said a detail manager working in education.

Indeed, many will understand that accepting change is vital if they are to keep their jobs.

"There is a fear of everything being in the cloud or everything being automated where half of the team will disappear with the traditional roles. So it's just introducing it gradually while preserving the existing staff."

@_JohnLeonard