Enterprises and professional football teams have a lot in common. The pressures of being more agile, more resilient while ensuring performance is felt both on and off the field. For CIOs, surviving and thriving requires a serious focus on operations tied to business mandates and growth.
I am frequently asked questions around infrastructure and operations (I&O) with organizations looking to solve ITOps, DevOps and DevSecOps challenges.
- How do we shift from legacy ITOps models to transformative digital operations?
- How do we align process, people and tools for closer integration, consolidation and correlation?
- How are we structured as teams across functions—ITOps, DevOps, SecOps?
- How do we transform to analytics-driven operations at speed and efficiency?
Historically, Agile and DevOps teams face off on the IT playing field as adversaries; both sides want to advance their plans, execute plays and reach the end zone. Disconnects happen when teams are not aligned, goals are not defined and resources are constrained.
To effectively deliver digital services, teams must focus on the essentials of clear communication, unified culture and measures to ensure resiliency, performance and availability if they are to be effective.
Traditional I&O teams often operate independently, and knowledge is not shared nor available to cross-functional teams. Attempts to respond and resolve critical incidents can take longer. With DevOps or even DevSecOps, the ideal is for groups to align across functions by breaking down silos of tooling and responsibility.
In a hybrid ops environment, a lack of integration and coordination between DevOps roles can easily misalign efforts and priorities. Whether it’s hybrid in terms of IT environment or hybrid in support model, there are unique challenges that must be addressed. Not being able to huddle around the same data sets while troubleshooting incidents poses a huge challenge when implementing proper analytics comes into play. Legacy IT operations management (ITOM) tools simply cannot support DevOps’ use of cloud-native services nor support remote IT teams working globally.
For successful DevOps and traditional Agile teams to coexist and be successful, IT leaders need to change existing mindsets and implement new practices in order to scale.
- DevOps and ITOps groups have to feel supported by the entire IT organization.
Often DevOps starts as an experiment with a small group of people working on one application. Everyone in IT, from the leaders to IT workers, needs to understand what the end goals are for integrating new methodologies. Deep realization sets in when DevOps finishes a project and pushes to production which is still supported in traditional ITOps models. It becomes obvious that operations needs to adapt to frequent change.
- Plan and implement DevOps practices to avoid disruptions.
With legacy systems still in practice for delivering digital services, DevOps teams cannot disrupt critical day-to-day operations by driving new support models without taking into account migration considerations. Instead, teams will need to work in a hybrid model using application development delivery methods.
- Collaboration and planning tools are essential.
The use of collaboration and planning tools alongside automation capabilities is essential in hybrid organizations. Start by automating alerts to generate tickets for the appropriate team(s) to handle versus having Level 1 support process all alerts independently.
- Build or buy scalable data analysis systems.
These systems will aggregate and correlate data across infrastructure and digital/cloud-native technologies to deliver contextual insights to problems and provide corrective steps to resolve them.
Scaling and modernizing operations and creating agile practices is an ongoing process that needs constant planning, testing and adapting. Streamlining DevOps and ITOps processes using automation starts the process as teams begin to work together versus working in traditional silos.
For winning football franchises, dynasties weren’t built in a single season; the same is true for your digital ops transformation. It takes challenging the status quo—taking a hard look at the deeply embedded ways ITOps has always been done—and reimagining the whole process focused on data-driven digital operations.