What Is DevOps needed for Systems of Engagement?
Making any kind of change in business is often hard and typically requires an investment. Anytime an organization adopts any kind of new technology, methodology, or approach, that adoption ought to be driven by a business need. To build a business case for adopting DevOps, one must understand the business need for it, which includes the challenges that it addresses.
The Business Need
Organizations strive to create innovative applications or services to solve business problems. This might be either to address internal business needs or provide services that reach out to their clients or end users. A majority of the organizations have challenges undertaking software projects successfully, and their failures are often associated with challenges in software development and delivery. Though the majority of enterprises consider software development and delivery are critical a tiny percent feel that their teams are effective. This execution gap leads to missed business opportunities.
This problem has been further amplified by a significant shift in the kinds of applications that businesses are expected to deliver, from systems of record to systems of engagement:
Systems of record:
Conventional software applications are often large systems that function as systems of record, which include things like massive amounts of data and/or transactions and are intended to be highly reliable and stable. As these applications don’t need to change often, organizations will often meet the needs of their customers and their own business needs by delivering only one or two significant new releases a year.
Systems of engagement:
With the advent of mobile communications and the maturity of web applications, systems of record are being supplemented by systems of engagement, which customers can access directly and use to interact with the business. Such applications must be easy to use, high performing, and capable of rapid change to address customers’ changing behavior and evolving market forces.
Because systems of engagement are utilized directly by customers, they demand intense focus on user experience, speed of delivery, and agility – in other words, a DevOps approach.
Systems of engagement aren’t isolated islands and are often tied to systems of record, so rapid changes to systems of engagement bring about changes to systems of record. Any kind of system that needs rapid delivery of innovation requires DevOps. Such innovation is driven primarily by emerging technology trends such as cloud computing, mobile applications, Big Data, and social media, which may affect all types of systems.
Recognizing the Business Value
DevOps applies agile and lean principles across the entire software supply chain. It enables a business to maximize the speed of its delivery of a product or service, from initial idea to production release to customer feedback to enhancements based on that feedback.
Because DevOps improves the way that a business delivers value to its customers, suppliers, and partners, it’s an essential business process, not just an IT capability.
DevOps provides significant return on investment in three areas:
- Enhanced customer experience
- Increased capacity to innovate
- Faster time to value
In conclusion, DevOps helps deliver better systems of engagement and help business reach their customers by adapting to their changing behavior and keep them engaged
