The Blog

  • December 5, 2019
  • DevOps and platform strategy

    The software development lifecycle has always reminded me of the proverb of the three blind people confronting an elephant. One grabs the trunk and says it’s a snake, another a tusk and says it’s a spear while the third feels its side and calls it a wall. The moral of the proverb is that perception has a lot to do with perspective.

    For a long time, the perspective on software was that it was a cost, a necessary cost for sure, but other considerations like how users experience it and how employees work with it, as determined by its quality, were secondary. That perception was handed down pretty much intact from the mainframe days and as long as cloud computing and subscription services didn’t exist, it was good enough.

    But when cloud computing and subscriptions became mainstream the definitions of profit and ROI also changed. Profit shrank on a per-transaction basis though vendors knew they had to excel at small interactions to keep customers coming back. ROI was once a one and done phenomenon in which a new system paid for itself through cost savings that eliminated some labor from business processes through automation that let customers self-serve.

    Today ROI has changed because the return on a software investment is much less about automating to save money and much more about using software driven business processes to capture opportunities that pop up in the business world. So calculating the return is much more about time to market or time to value than ever. With that change, business needs to speed delivery of software but also, importantly, deliver software that works, is error-free, and gets a vendor there first to capture those ephemeral opportunities.

    It’s the old better-faster-cheaper conundrum but it’s no longer acceptable to get two out of three. We’re playing for all of the marbles here.

    New tools

    Into this milieu we’ve launched numerous intellectual tools and a few software of the software variety. The brain tools go by names like Agile, Scrum, Lean and more. The software tools are code generators, clicks instead of code development, and embedded functions like analytics, workflow, security, and integration services that the code generators weave together into a working application. Significantly, all of this lives on the modern software platform.

    In my humble opinion I don’t see how you can operate a modern application development shop without a platform. Many, if not most, vendors offer a platform or platform-like environment and a new approach to development called DevOps has been percolating in the IT space.

    A recent article in Harvard Business Review by Melody Meckfessel, VP of Engineering, Google Cloud, provides a thorough grounding in DevOps for executives wanting to understand more about yet another thing that has landed on their plates. A successful DevOps rollout in your organization will require some executive involvement because at its heart it is a culture change moving from silos to collaboration, transparency, and sharing. Check out Meckfessel’s article for more.

    Key values of DevOps

    Unlike the values of earlier programming paradigms, like lowering costs, a DevOps strategy orients toward time to value. I’ve been researching the topic over the summer and will have a detailed report soon but for now let it suffice to say that a well-articulated DevOps strategy can lower costs significantly while empowering employees to take reasonable chances when conceiving and delivering their work products.

    Most importantly for the business, DevOps, along with a software development platform that generates running code, is essential to any attempt at digital disruption. Gathering customer data and analyzing it will generate useful information, but a major part of the information needs to be incorporated into the software that supports new or enhanced business processes. So, I like to suggest an equivalence that says: software flexibility drives business agility, which drives profits in the modern enterprise.

    And what drives software flexibility? The close-in answer is the platform but the less obvious companion is DevOps. According the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services study mentioned above, 86 percent of those surveyed say that it is important for their company to develop and put new software into production quickly. But it goes without saying that the code has to work and be error free and that’s where platform is needed.

    It’s not too late

    If you’re feeling left out because your business is struggling with building and delivering software quickly, don’t be. The same study says only 10 percent of respondents say their company is very successful at rapid development and deployment. There’s a vast middle of respondents or 61 percent, who report being neutral or somewhat successful at rapid deployment and implementation.

    There’s more to this though. How do we determine what’s fast and what’s just average practice? Earlier data from my research suggests that leaders just getting into modern platform-based CRM think that rapid change is something that’s done as many as four times per year. But people who are in the middle of the transformation are shooting for being able to change their applications’ behavior nearly continuously deploying weekly or faster.

    My two bits

    Clearly, such rapid iteration needs both tools and approaches and that’s why DevOps is becoming such a big deal. Your approach to DevOps will be significantly different if you’re using a platform. For instance, issues surrounding operating systems and databases can evaporate if your platform deals with those issues thus enabling you to encounter DevOps at a higher level from the outset. From there on, DevOps is largely about supporting people, encouraging sharing and transparency and involving users. It’s an important part of your future especially if you’re trying to figure out if the rest of your business is successful, more so if you’re looking for ways to improve.

     

     

    Published: 4 years ago


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