There’s not much point to DevOps if the business isn’t directly benefiting through increased efficiency, productivity and, hopefully, profitability. This is possible only when IT and DevOps teams are delivering the technology the business actually needs to succeed and compete.
As IBM director in IBM Cloud writes in his post, “Putting the ‘Biz’ in DevOps“: “The goal in any meaningful DevOps practice is to reduce the time and improve the efficiency in moving from the “Business Need” on the left to the “It’s Live!” on the right.”
That alignment, while essential, isn’t easy to achieve. As I mentioned previously in my post, “The Big Digital Transformation Trends Through 2017,” the Deloitte 2016 – 2017 Global CIO Survey found that the expectations business has for IT are out of sync when it comes to what IT actually can deliver. The survey found this to be true when it comes to customer focus, technology-enabled business growth and innovation. For example, “even though 57 percent of the CIOs surveyed said that customers were their organization’s top business priority, less than half were involved in delivering customer experience (45 percent) or working on customer acquisition, retention and loyalty (44 percent),” that report found.
That survey also found, startlingly, that while only 5 percent of organizations say that strategic alignment of IT activities with business strategy is a leading-class capability in their organization, 80 percent of organizations believe such alignment is critical to success.
With this in mind, we’ve cultivated some of the best stories and other content on DevOps.com when it comes to effective alignment of DevOps efforts and business strategy.
The Big Digital Transformation Trends Through 2017
Some of the most important trends in 2017 will include CIOs struggling to break out of the role of IT plumber and to better align the business with IT.
How to Align Your DevOps and Cloud Initiatives – DevOps.com
One of the best ways to align with the business is to move software more swiftly with continuous delivery efforts. In this post, Michael Schmidt, head of the Automic DevOps Practice, details how to best manage IaaS, PaaS along with DevOps so that organizations can develop more quickly, and rapidly move to continuous delivery.
The Conundrum of Adopting DevOps within Organizational Constraints
In this post, DevOps.com regular contributor JP Morgenthal explains that as with most changes within IT, with DevOps adoption, there is a need for bottom-up support as well as a top-down requirement that provides the coverage, financing, motivation and accountability to the business to enable change to occur.
Here, Rick Weaver, director IBM Cloud, explains how by adopting the right business-oriented metrics will help expand DevOps capabilities into a broader, more meaningful “BizDevOps” practices.
Enterprise DevOps: Organizational Change a Must
In this article, Sanjeev Sharma, IBM Worldwide lead, details the principles necessary to foster application delivery team alignment from a people and team perspective—something that is essential if teams are to successfully align with DevOps.
It’s Time to Couple Security, Business Leadership
In this post, yours truly reviews the importance of aligning security and business leadership, and if organizations conducted themselves that way, there’d be a much smaller gap between security teams and their organization’s board of directors when it came to cybersecurity expectations and reality.