Last week we had the pleasure of hosting more than 100 of the industry’s best and brightest technologists at Momofuku’s beautiful top floor restaurant, Daishō, in downtown Toronto. The exclusive list of attendees was specifically curated to bring out folks hyper focused on digital transformation within their organizations. We took this opportunity to drive conversation around their experiences in the market and the pain points they face throughout their digital transformation. The feedback was great insight into how the leaders of today are managing their digital transformation.
No Longer Just the Innovators
The Amazons and Airbnbs of the world are now being joined in the digital sphere by many of our attendees from large organizations, as they successfully shift from traditional industry giants to nimble technology companies. That said, for most companies, competitive, regulatory, and internal constraints are putting pressure on IT development and operations, slowing innovation. Many of the organizations in attendance are turning to the automation of their processes through DevOps and Agile methodologies in an attempt to accelerate transformation.
Business and IT are Misaligned
Currently, a typical attendee’s DevOps toolchain automates only activities from code commit onward. The critical business planning stage of the software development journey tends to be overlooked in favour of automating the DevOps cycle. The attendees who have managed to automate workflows at all, have done so primarily through automated builds, tests, releases, or scaling. The upfront planning aspects of the workflow continue to exist in a vacuum, with limited ability to pivot based on ongoing market trends.
These business-driven objectives are seen to be arguably the most important link in the chain, accelerating innovation and business value when properly integrated into ALM processes. With business stakeholders largely out of the loop, a critical misalignment between the Business and the broader IT team is created. Most attendees found that this misalignment causes slowed innovation, failed projects, inefficiency, and significant risk of losing market share to nimbler competition.
The Need for BizDevOps
This lack of Business-IT alignment has led to increased failures in IT projects despite the widespread adoption of Agile methodologies. The traditional DevOps toolchain is focused on automation from code commit to deployment, without recognizing the value of business alignment in driving true value through the toolchain. These issues can be alleviated by adopting the new BizDevOps model presented by Ruth Zive, CMO at Blueprint. Activities in the Biz loop ensure that business stakeholders are part of the broader DevOps cycle, and here’s the best part – this loop can be automated.
BizDevOps is the natural progression of digital transformation, enabling:
- Greater business value as products get to market
- Expansion of the DevOps loop to encompass business automation
- Business-IT alignment to accelerate the speed and value of innovation
As Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence capabilities become more commonplace, this loop will become more predictable and efficient. As a result of these trends, many industry thought leaders predict that by 2020, much of the SDLC toolchain will be automated from end-to-end.
