3 Basic Components of Digital Transformation for Businesses

Over the last decade, DevOps has gone from a novel concept to a buzzword in every boardroom. As enterprises increasingly rely more on digitally transformed business environments, markets demand faster, smarter and much more agile business processes. Organizations of all sizes have no choice but to transform their business cultures to enable their teams to collaborate more quickly and autonomously.

While the pandemic has clearly increased the importance of DevOps in the workplace, the practice has been around for a long time. According to the report 2021: State of the Atlassian Ecosystem, 54% of firms have embraced a DevOps strategy, up from 48% in 2020. In the next three years, another 27% of respondents hope to use a DevOps strategy.

Indeed, DevOps has become mainstream, as seen by the increase in job advertisements for “DevOps engineers” and businesses’ eagerness to tout their “experienced DevOps teams.” Some of these statements and attitudes, on the other hand, can be interpreted as red flags, indicating that businesses are using DevOps principles on isolated teams. Worse, they are merely renaming traditional engineering positions as DevOps rather than executing a complete cultural shift that applies to the entire organization and allows it to ship dependable products at a considerably faster rate.

In light of this, here are three critical building blocks for businesses wanting to avoid typical pitfalls and scale their DevOps strategies efficiently.

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Employee empowerment and culture change

For DevOps to be effective, all teams should be on board, while stakeholder buy-in is heavily influenced by the business culture in which they operate. Employees will naturally oppose change if they don’t understand how DevOps will benefit them personally and the company as a whole. After all, it’s a completely new way of thinking for many departments, particularly operations teams, who have traditionally mitigated risk by reducing change and moving slowly. DevOps pushes people to work faster by delivering marginal changes through continuous integration in a fail-fast, fail-forward pipeline.

As a result, it is critical to educate people in order to achieve success. Organizations should provide employees clear insights into what it will be like to work differently. The significance of accepted definitions of success, and complete transparency of the job to be done is critical. The true value addition of DevOps can be realized through doing so, as well as sharing actionable insights that teams can apply to their work and then monitor the outcomes, regardless of where they are in the pipeline.

Using four fundamental processes to build a DevOps foundation

Organizations should abandon the traditional trust-but-verify model in order to achieve a successful DevOps transformation. Instead, they should include a set of critical processes that enable everyone to work more efficiently and effectively toward delivering high-quality, timely software that meets the needs of the end-user. Collaboration, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), automation, and monitoring are among the key processes.

While collaboration has been a major rallying cry for enabling globally distributed IT teams to align their goals and achieve their objectives, automation has also been critical.

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Adopting the correct transformational tools

Predictable performance is critical as teams grow and DevOps processes scale. To support their collaboration workflow, the enterprise’s tools need to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all the while performing at a high level of excellence.

Using DevOps tools, however, does not imply that firms are following DevOps principles. The commitment that businesses have  towards holistically adopting the kind of culture and processes indicated above, limits the utility of tooling. It is because of this blend that they are able to change the way they produce and deliver their products. Having said that, it’s critical to recognize the importance of implementing the right tool chain, as well as the wide range of options and combinations available—easy to see how decision-makers could become overwhelmed.