Accelerating digital transformation - DevOps is going mainstream in the enterprise

DevOps has become a prerequisite for digital transformation

It's hard to believe, but this year marks the ten-year anniversary of DevOps. In this decade, DevOps has represented one of the biggest IT transformation initiatives of the last 30 years.

As the digital economy accelerates and companies face competitive pressure to deliver value faster, enterprises are having to rethink how they plan, develop and deliver new customer value. With digital transformation projects picking up for many companies, DevOps can be seen as a prerequisite, removing technical and cultural constraints to deliver value "at the speed of business". There is no question that DevOps is going mainstream - and the business reason for this is in direct correlation with the idea of digital transformation.

Despite constant predictions around the rapid adoption of DevOps, its spread in the enterprise has been slower than expected. Due to the historically conservative nature of enterprise IT, many organisations are still waiting for a push. This will change in 2019 as CIOs and senior IT executives will need to adapt their business strategies to an evolving digital economy that forces companies to do more with less. These companies will begin to standardise on DevOps practices across the enterprise, lest they leave themselves open to the threat of being disrupted.

I made the prediction last year that 2018 would be the year DevOps shifted its focus from ‘Dev' to ‘Ops'. DORA's State of DevOps 2018 survey highlighted this move by capturing and measuring operational performance in an industry-leading DevOps study of nearly 1,900 IT professionals globally. Through an analysis of the survey's data, it was apparent that availability measures and Ops are considerably correlated with software delivery performance.

Doing more with less

An additional factor contributing to DevOps going mainstream is the current economic environment paired with a tight job market that pushes organisations to continually seek new ways to optimise. These days, a DevOps team of three can handle what once took a team of nine. While DevOps was a little-known term five years ago, its path to mainstream awareness has resulted in DevOps engineers being the most recruited job title on LinkedIn.

As companies begin to accelerate their digital transformation projects and understand that DevOps is imperative to business success, CIOs will realise that their bottom lines will be impacted without DevOps practices in place. This notion is evident in the 2018-19 World Quality Report, which found that DevOps has reached a tipping point, with 99 per cent of the respondents saying they use DevOps in at least some of their projects. Up until recently, organisations largely shied away from implementing DevOps on their core business applications, but this is also changing due to the need to do more with less.

The last decade has been an interesting one for DevOps. While adoption was slow at first, the current business landscape of high stakes technological disruption has made it clear that we will start to see large enterprises standardising on DevOps practices. As a requirement for digital transformation projects, the implementation of DevOps will continue to rise due to companies needing to innovate faster with less risk - for the sake of their customers as well as their stockholders.

There is no question that the pressure is on for companies to digitally transform. With DevOps being an essential precondition for this process, we will see more full scale implementations by large enterprises as the practice continues to go mainstream.

Mark Levy is director of strategy at Micro Focus