British Gas says DevOps and a startup culture key to deriving cloud benefits

Don't ignore business concerns but don't let them stop new ideas, says energy giant

British Gas has explained how adopting a startup mindset based on DevOps principles is key to getting the most out of cloud tools.

Speaking at the Computing Cloud and Infrastructure Summit, IT architect for British Gas Chris Patten explained the cloud has been key to helping build new tools for staff, including a new app for engineers that provides information on customers.

He said that while the benefits of this work are clear, such as the ability to give engineers up-to-date information such as the precise reason for the call-out and the location of the property, getting the app up and running posed numerous challenges.

These chiefly centred on the cultural mindset of the wider organisation being wary of the use of cloud services to host potentially sensitive data and building new tools and services without the usual safeguards and processes in place.

To mitigate this, Pattern explained the team was proactive in trying to break down the barrier between development and operations staff so they could understand what they were doing and how it fitted into the business.

"What we needed to do was reduce friction and barriers between our devs team and the operations staff," he said.

"We did this in a number of ways, very much as a ‘diplomacy initiative' by inviting people to talk to us to understand what we were working on and having feedback sessions, as well as making wikis to aid collaboration on projects."

Conversely, though, the DevOps team was in some ways kept separate from the rest of the business to stop other departments from meddling.

"We built a ‘box' around our DevOps team so there was always someone to deal with things like financial issues, governance, infosec and so on from others in the business, without the DevOps teams being involved," he said.

"This let them continue working as we wanted them to work, including having the ability to make mistakes and learn as they went, while still acknowledging the concerns of other business units."

Doing this allowed the DevOps team to act as a "startup incubator" that focused on working quickly, building new tools and constant iteration.

"We really went about exploiting an innovation culture and getting people to work in an agile manner," he said.

"This had a big effect, because work became much faster and more immediate, it became a lot more rewarding to staff who then spent more time trying to fix and improve what they were working on.

"It also helped them develop their skills, which again was seen as rewarding."

However, creating a skilled workforce used to working in this manner also poses problems around keeping staff motivated after a project finishes, especially when they know their skills will be in demand elsewhere.

"It can be a challenge retaining good staff as once the work slackens off it's hard to motivate them to want to stay."

The event also saw Computing's latest research into the state of cloud uptake unveiled, with 75 per cent of firms telling us they expect their use of cloud services to increase in the next 12 months, with many firms increasingly going cloud first, or even cloud only.