What is DevOps?

DevOps

Development Operations

My Development & Operations teams working better together.

This article isn’t for the DevOps choir. This article is for business owners and executives who wish to gain a strategic advantage in the marketplace by delivering value to physical or software products. Some individuals may only see a buzzword. Others may have only been exposed to this term in short pitch decks during a client paid lunch with pictures of gears and infinity symbols.

What is DevOps though? DevOps is simple, it is a way of thinking about IT culture to align goals across divisions.

As an executive, you have goals for your business.

1.      You want to do more of the activity that makes you money.

2.      You want to do that activity faster.

3.      You want to expend as little capital during that activity.

It’s likely that unless you own or manage an IT company, your passion is not information technology. You may have some trusted advisors, an application development director, and an infrastructure director.

The development director has progressed through the ranks based on ability to code complex systems fast, and quickly answer business needs with technology. Innovation and creativity are key traits for success for this director. The faster they bring a product or project to market, they more likely they will be promoted.

The infrastructure director progresses through the ranks because of the ability to maintain complex infrastructure with high reliability. The core foundation of this is not to change a working system, or if a system needs to be changed it must be done slowly and carefully through a well thought out plan. Much of the success that allows an infrastructure engineer to grow through the ranks is the completion of these plans.

I may have lost you now, so to summarize:

Application Director – Fast, Complex, Creative

Infrastructure Director – Slow, Methodical, Stable

How does this impact you as an owner or executive? With competing priorities, you may have to make choices that impact security, time to market, uptime, and customer experience. You have each advisor giving you different advice. The Application director is excited about the new product and ready to get it out the door, and wants you to get the operations team to comply. The Infrastructure director advises caution, warns of risk, compliance, and quality.

What if both teams were giving you the same advice? What if there was just one team? A DevOps team? How can you as an executive better align your teams to get everything you want? How do you get your product to market fast, and still sleep at night knowing that your infrastructure can take it, and the auditors will be satisfied?

As a leader this is where you can get your advisors into the room and talk about DevOps. Start the conversation about collaboration and a new way of doing things enabled by software driven infrastructure. With a good culture and process, you can scale your DevOps teams to do more of what makes you money. These teams will deliver growth to your business faster and more efficiently because they are aligned with the business goals.

If you are interested in hearing more, or just want to talk about DevOps, please let me know. I enjoy puzzles and delivering value at a high level. I would enjoy the opportunity to talk about the future of business process with the technology now available.