Have you ever seen someone draw a parallel between DevOps and digital transformation? I can bet you have not. Most people consider DevOps and digital transformation as they are poles apart but the fact is that they are perilously close to one another. In fact, the processes and tools used in DevOps can also speed up digital transformation. According to Yugal Joshi, Vice President of digital, cloud, and application services at Everest Group defines DevOps as, “DevOps, in its simplest form, is the coming together of various technical design, build, delivery, and operations teams to serve business objectives.” DevOps can combine all these phases to ensure faster delivery and effective infrastructure management. Best of all, it can highlight challenges individual teams are facing so other teams can know about them. In this article, you will learn about seven ways in which DevOps can help with digital transformation.7 Ways DevOps Can Assist With Digital TransformationHere are seven ways in which DevOps can help you digitally transform your business.
1. Facilitate Rapid Change
The faster pace of technology evolution has forced enterprises to deliver faster applications and analytics. DevOps is one of the best mobile app development companies to develop and deploy an application that ensures continuous delivery. One of the biggest advantages of this agility is that it puts you in a better position to deal with extreme and sudden shifts. You just need a well throughout the digital strategy and you are good to make these shifts. Organizations that adopt DevOps can pivot quickly and help your business survive and thrive during turbulent times.
2. Fosters a Digital Mindset
The ever-changing customer demands and behavior have forced businesses to cultivate a digital mindset in their organization and hone their digital capabilities. According to Peter A High, author of the book “Getting to Nimble: How to Transform Your Company into a Digital Leader” and president of the technology and business advisory firm Metis Strategy summed it up brilliantly when he said, “DevOps is not only technical enablement but also a fundamental shift to a more digital mindset, leveraging automation to force hard questions about managing risk while moving quickly.” It helps you manage your risks efficiently without compromising on agility.
3. Encourages Experimentation
When you adopt DevOps, you will have to embrace the agile mindset, processes, tools, and culture that comes with it. The benefit of this is that it helps your business to accelerate the pace of application delivery. The faster you move, the more likely you are to fail and there is nothing wrong with that because it also lets you fail faster, learn from those mistakes, and experiment. This provides you with a better opportunity to try new things and respond to market feedback faster. All these things make DevOps and digital transformation a lucrative proposition for businesses.
4. Shared Accountability
When you look at DevOps from a digital transformation perspective, you will notice that it will create a common vision, establish a performance measurement culture, and pays a lot of emphasis on operating a digital framework. What this does is that it holds your team accountable for not just their part of their work but the impact their work has on the entire organization. As a result, all your team members work towards a common vision and stay on the same page. This also prevents employees from indulging in the blame game, which protects your team cohesion. When all your team members are united for a common cause, you are more likely to see positive results as compared to dispersed teams with internal issues.
5. Faster Customer Feedback
Since DevOps usually follows the agile approach, it also offers the benefits agile methodologies tend to offer. One of the notable among those is the ability to adjust your strategy when needed and make corrections at every iteration. This can come in handy when responding to evolving consumer demands and behaviors.
Additionally, it can also help you satisfy the needs of different stakeholders such as employees, partners, suppliers, and vendors in a much better way. As soon as you receive feedback, you can incorporate it into your products and services, which increases the chances of customer satisfaction.
6. Help Teams Move Faster
In today’s highly competitive business environment, you need to make your product stand out to get noticed. One of the ways to do that is to gain a first-mover advantage. Introduce a unique product or service that no one is offering or bring a product or service faster to the market than your competitors and you can easily gain an upper hand over the competition. DevOps helps you achieve this goal. Don’t spend years perfecting your product, strive for a first-mover advantage. Andy Sealock, senior director at West Monroe, technology and business consultancy thinks that “Imperfect products that reach the market faster often beat out polished but delayed products because the business can gather customer feedback and iterate more quickly.”By automating different stages involved in the process such as coding, testing, and deployment, you can reduce the time required to bring the products and services to your customers. The shorter feedback cycles can minimize delays and help your product engineers to churn newer products at a rapid pace. You can also invest in cheap dedicated server hosting for software development.. If you can bring your products faster to the market than your competitors, you can easily get ahead of them.
7. Increases Automation
Whether you are trying to implement digital transformation in your company or have already done so, DevOps can come in handy in both situations. By adopting DevOps best practices and tools, businesses can increase the automation, cybersecurity maturity, and agility of their organization. This makes it easy for businesses to conduct automated security testing whenever new code is created. Similarly, it gives your team freedom to work in a hybrid-cloud environment. In short, all this can contribute to increasing the effectiveness of your existing digital transformation initiatives.
How can DevOps facilitate digital transformation in your opinion? Feel free to share it with us in the comments section below.
