DevOps Summit: Trying to solve a silo issue by creating another silo is 'Jar Jar Binks bad'

Hiscox's Jonathan Fletcher argues that DevOps is the way forward when it comes to solving issues in IT

IT has a tradition of being divided into separate silos, but the organisation is never going to solve a lack of joined-up thinking by creating other departments to deal with new projects, but rather DevOps should encompass many areas and bring them together.

That's what Jonathan Fletcher, technology and platform lead at business insurance firm Hiscox, told the audience during his presentation at the Computing DevOps Summit 2015.

He argued that that approach is so bad, it's as bad a Jar Jar Binks, the much-maligned "comedy" character from Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

"You don't solve the problem of silos by creating other silos, that's bad. Not only is it bad, it's Jar Jar Binks bad," said Fletcher, who argued that DevOps is a "really good" way of enabling development agility within the organisation as it allows teams to collaborate on testing and development.

"It's about getting some capabilities that people can start to reuse; lower that cost of entry to start and you can do that through a DevOps team. You're evangelising and enabling others, not just doing it yourself," he explained.

Fletcher said driving a DevOps-based focus at Hiscox has very much been worth it, massively improving continuous deployment speed.

"With one application we've had 150 deployments in the last three days, that's pretty monumental when we were talking about one release every 10 weeks before," he told the audience, explaining that it led to the company's "biggest ever change programme".

"It's a £100m project and we reduced about 17 man days in about 10 minutes through deployment automation, which is a pretty substantial return on investment," he explained.

Hiscox managed to cycle down some areas of development from 10 weeks to two weeks, said Fletcher, who described how, thanks to DevOps, development and testing isn't confined to a single silo, but rather each team can do it themselves, thus speeding the process up.

"It's automated. If you want to do it, you click a button, you don't need to understand all the ins and outs of it," he said. "You don't need a book with 5,000 steps. Forget that, click a button, anyone can do it.

"In fact one of our business teams can test things themselves because it's just a button that they press. You can get to the extent of maturity where business units can do it for themselves," Fletcher concluded.