In every industry, business cycles, driven by digital disruption, are accelerating. Now more than ever, IT service delivery cannot become a bottleneck. IT processes need to become faster and more agile along with the rest of the business cycle. More and more, standard tasks and processes are executed by increasingly autonomic systems that are data-driven, augmented by artificial intelligence and automated. This enables human work to be reorganized so that it becomes more agile and efficient. As the boundaries between infrastructure and application services are beginning to blur, I believe we should see the rapid emergence of DevOps practices within service delivery processes.

DevOps was first practiced in “born-on-the-cloud” organizations, leading to the integration and even merging of development and operations teams. In recent years, it has been adopted successfully in ‘traditional’ enterprises, IT service delivery organizations and hybrid cloud environments.

In 2014, IBM defined DevOps with a business outcome perspective as an “essential enterprise capability for continuous delivery of software-driven innovation that enables organizations to seize market opportunities and reduce time-to-customer feedback.”

DevOps practices are designed to dramatically improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of the delivery process to increase speed and lower cost and risk. Companies like Nationwide (a former customer of mine) have seen a 50% improvement in code quality and a 70% decrease in end-user downtime, with 58% of their teams in the top productivity quartile of the industry.

DevOps can bridge the cultural divide between application development teams and IT operations teams by fusing the lean approaches adopted by operations with the agile practices favored by development teams. Then, these processes can be extended across the entire software and service delivery process end-to-end, from client requirements to development and operations. From there, a continuous delivery feedback loop between the IT and development teams can be created that gives both teams a shared view of outcomes.

To ensure that a solution delights the target audience, DevOps is increasingly blended with Design Thinking, a disciplined iterative design approach that focuses on establishing a small number of design goals with verification through sponsor users, which can help you stay in touch with what end users will want out of the product.

Continuous Delivery Pipelines

For efficient delivery, DevOps draws heavily on the lean concept of a continuous delivery pipeline. This requires removal of waste and bottlenecks at every step of the development process to achieve faster throughput. Process improvement methods like Value Stream Mapping are an integral part of the DevOps toolkit, as are the elimination of hand-offs, the automation of tasks and the reduction of work in progress.