10 Reasons Why Every Enterprise Needs A DevOps Strategy In 2021

Bottom Line: Enterprises need to become more DevOps-driven if they're going to keep up with the quickening pace of app and platform improvements needed to stay competitive and cybersecure in 2021 and beyond.

DevOps continues to prove its value by combining software development and IT operations' strengths to deliver new applications faster and with higher quality than before. The Boston Consulting Group's (BCG) classic and much-quoted article, Leaner, Faster and Better with DevOps, explains DevOps' value succinctly through a series of graphics and examples based on the consulting firm's experiences. The essence of an effective DevOps strategy is creating shared collaboration and ownership across software development and IT operations for code produced and apps launched.  The following graphic captures how DevOps creates value across enterprises: 

DevOps Needs To Deliver Real-Time Responses To Opportunities & Threats

Every enterprise is competing against tighter time-to-market windows than they ever have before. Add to that the need for real-time responses to cyberattacks targeting the core executables of cybersecurity monitoring platforms and tools. It's clear IT platforms need to deliver real-time responses to threats now. The surest path to being more competitive in any market is to be faster than competitors in capitalizing on new customer opportunities. Given how mercurial many markets are today, there's no time to waste when creating customer-facing apps that serve prospects and customers better than competitors. DevOps delivers competitive strength to any organization willing to make it a core part of its DNA. A typical DevOps team in a $500M+ enterprise has over 200 concurrent projects in progress, with over 70% dedicated to safeguarding and improving customer experiences.

Speed and quality have never been more essential to enterprises' core DevOps DNA as they are today. Enterprises achieving speed and quality gains need to start with a clear strategy for automating DevOps' six key areas. These six areas often start with Build and Test on the DevOps side. On the IT Operations side, Deployment, Release, Operations and Monitoring show the highest potential for automation today. The following BCG graphic from the Leaner, Faster and Better with DevOps article is shown below:

How To Strengthen The Business Case For DevOps

Responding in real-time to opportunities and threats is the essence of why DevOps continues to gain adoption across enterprises today. The fuel that keeps DevOps going happens when Development and IT Operations are committed to working together to deliver exceptional shared work, which is most often compelling new apps and customer tools. Joint ownership and commitment across teams produce excellent work and a new level of code quality and development speed. The best DevOps leaders work diligently to keep teamwork going by removing any obstacle that DevOps teams face.

By focusing on the ten factors below, DevOps leaders continually strengthen the foundation their teams need to excel and deliver excellent results. Enterprises that don't have a DevOps strategy yet often rely on these ten factors to build their initial business case:

1.    DevOps can bring greater scale, traceability and visibility to IT Operations, saving millions of dollars a year in unnecessary downtime expenses. The consistency DevOps delivers to the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) reduces the potential for code changes to impact production. The IT Process Institute Visible Ops Handbook found that 80% of unplanned production outages are due to incorrectly planned changes to IT Operations' production systems. Gartner found that people and process issues will cause up to 80% of outages impacting mission-critical services. IDC's DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified Study finds that the average hourly cost of a critical application failure is between $500,000 to $1 million and unplanned application downtime costs the typical Fortune 1000 company up to $1.25 billion in lost sales and productivity.

2.    Embedding workflow orchestration into DevOps can speed up application and service cycle times by 3X or more, translating into faster time-to-market, lower costs and improved customer service. During a session at the BMC Exchange event last fall, Tampa General Hospital shared how it faced the challenges of having a backlog of applications and services that needed to be produced that would improve patient care navigation and collaboration across clinical departments and regional hospitals as the region struggled to contain Covid-19. The hospitals are not on the same network and often compete with each other. Control-M from BMC integrated disparate data from disparate systems across hospitals that had never collaborated before, reaching a new level of automated, orchestrated response to patient needs. This included marrying technologies like database jobs, EMRs and also automating Covid data files. With so many employees working from home, Tampa General needed to receive and automate Covid data files coming in from various sources. Since Control-M has AWS S3 for managed file transfer, it was possible to set up and have files coming in from different hospitals. Today, every hospital can provide executive leadership with more real-time access to the data they need to run the hospital to deliver care effectively in the middle of a pandemic. The following graphic illustrates how the hospital is standardizing on BMC's Control-M end-to-end workflow orchestration:

3.    Measurable gains in code quality and software quality assurance that catch bugs in code before it is released to customers reduce the high costs of customer service, code patches and in some cases, swapping out apps entirely. BCG's recent article, Going All In With DevOps, explains that when code is produced iteratively using DevOps, bugs are found sooner and more easily removed from a codebase. The error detection zone becomes more effective in stopping bad code from being released, as the graphic from BCG's article illustrates:

4.    By breaking down DevOps strategies,' it's possible to create a metrics-driven roadmap to value that quantifies its financial contributions over time. In speaking with CFOs and their teams actively investing in DevOps today, all rely on financially-based metrics to evaluate ROI. Three dominant themes dominate CFOs' roadmaps, including optimizing staff, decreasing expenses and increasing sales.

5.    Greater collaboration across Development, IT Operations, Finance, Sales and Executive Management closes gaps in financial reporting – especially when it comes to new app development. DevOps increases communication across a company, averting costly mistakes when applications are initially being created or patched. One example is how the finance team needed to have standard cost variances from an app under development. Knowing the cost variances had a direct impact on the profitability of the business unit.

6.    Relying on DevOps to provide new tools that monitor risk-based metrics and KPIs to gain greater visibility into the root cause of potential risks to revenue. Lost sales, accounts and customers often happen because sales and service teams don't know there is an issue soon enough. Using DevOps to create new apps that can provide alerts on key revenue, pricing and quoting metrics can save a sale, retain customers and pinpoint a specific product issue.

7.    Eliminating the roadblocks that stand in the way of creating next-generation smart, connected products that deliver subscription revenue is one of the fastest-growing areas of DevOps today. The era of smart, connected products has arrived. Manufacturers predict 47% of all their products will be smart, connected and capable of generating product-as-a-service revenue within the next three years. Capgemini's conservative estimate based on survey data and market analysis is that smart, connected products will add $518.9B or 6.63% to manufacturing value-added to the GNP of surveyed countries.

8.    DevOps enables product teams to see more opportunities to excel in every customer experience area, further fueling new product ideas and entirely new businesses that drive organic revenue growth. DevOps enables engineering, manufacturing, sales and marketing to share a single, unified customer view. The following graphic illustrates how a DevOps project can provide every senior management team member with the analytics and insights they need to find new opportunities and expand into new products.      

9.    The Zero Trust framework, microsegmentation and endpoint security requirements of an organization need to be designed for every DevOps phase to reduce risk. The goal is to push Zero Trust principles to all related processes integrating with the DevOps pipeline, including all dependencies across the entire SDLC. CIOs and CISOs are saying that keeping developers productive outside of data privacy is their number one concern. What they are after is having their DevOps platform Zero-Trust enabled while also delivering greater agility, customer centricity and actionable insights. They're also focused on how to deliver a transcendent customer experience by automating customer transactions and providing automation everywhere and becoming a more data-driven business, all leading to Enterprise DevOps scalability. Frameworks like BMC's Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE) offer enterprises a roadmap that is agile enough to integrate Zero Trust into any enterprise's DevOps environment.   

10. DevOps frameworks can increase customer loyalty, Lifetime Customer Value (LCV) while providing an organization an opportunity to reinvent themselves digitally. Based on over a dozen interviews with DevOps leaders for this article, I found that 80% of the highest priority projects they're working on today are for touchless sales and service-oriented. Everyone speaks of protecting employees' health and welfare, customers and everyone in their value chains. What's needed is a framework that enables them to deliver a transcendent customer experience, automate customer transactions and support automation everywhere. One of the leaders in this area is BMC's Autonomous Digital Enterprise framework, which helps businesses harness Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities to excel at DevOps while digitally reinventing themselves. It helps enterprises innovate faster than their competitors by enabling the agility, customer centricity and actionable insights integral to driving data-driven business outcomes. The following is a graphic of the Autonomous Digital Enterprise framework:

Conclusion

Every business is facing a growing backlog of IT projects and not enough time to get them done. Traditional waterfall approaches to handling development aren't fast enough to keep up with the complexity, pace and scale of change today. BCG's articles provide a useful reference framework showing why DevOps' business case is so important. Equally interesting is the growing utility of frameworks like BMC's, which are designed to enable long-standing enterprises to embrace new digital business models seamlessly, so they can flex and change with the world around them.