It’s time to scale up with Enterprise DevOps
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It’s time to scale up with Enterprise DevOps

I’ve been writing for the past month or so about the opportunities and challenges of scaling DevOps activities in a model we refer to as Enterprise DevOps...

This is where enterprise organizations embrace DevOps as they seek both to improve Developer Velocity and to enable a wider digital transformation. As these digital transformations continue, IT departments are undergoing a DevOps transformation to ensure they can meet the evolving needs of the organization and its customers in a rapidly shifting digital economy.

I hear you asking what’s the difference between DevOps and Enterprise DevOps? Essentially, it comes down to scale. How do you scale your DevOps activities to meet the continually evolving (and growing) demands of an expanding digital footprint?

This is a topic covered in the new Enterprise DevOps Report 2020-21 from Sogeti and Microsoft. In it we describe how many existing enterprise organizations are stuck with years, or decades, of legacy applications and processes that struggle to remain coherent and relevant, while providing diminishing returns. These enterprises face a transformational DevOps evolution in a dynamic and shifting technological landscape.

 It’s not an easy task. And, as our report points out, enterprise-scale DevOps transformation can create challenges that hinder its ability to deliver anticipated value to the business.

Research-based report

The report draws on two bodies of research. The first is that carried out by McKinsey yielding the concept in April 2020 of the Developer Velocity Index (DVI). This is a metric that “pinpoints the most critical factors (related to technology, working practices, and organizational enablement) in achieving Developer Velocity”.

The second is a research study based on feedback from, and interviews with, Sogeti practitioners responsible for over 250 Cloud & DevOps implementations in enterprise organizations. The findings from the DVI study were combined with the Sogeti research to identify the six key areas of enterprise-scale IT that face significant challenges as part of Enterprise DevOps transformation: product management, distributed and remote working, governance, quality, security, and compliance

Top performers

Across these six enterprise-scale areas, top performers in the DevOps space are addressing the challenges by utilizing the following practices and solutions:

  • Moving from centralized ‘project-centric’ to de-centralized ‘product-focused’ delivery models
  • Teams draw on best practices from open-source projects and adopt an InnerSource methodology
  • Teams are being empowered to ‘code, ship, and collaborate from anywhere’ by adopting cloud-based collaboration platforms, DevOps toolchains, and distributed version control systems
  • Enterprises are moving to principles-led models of governance, where making doing the right thing the easy thing, and complying with governance, become a habit
  • DevOps practitioners are building, running, and managing their applications on self-service cloud platforms, and provide built-in security, compliance, and quality for all their products
  • Organizations are adopting an ‘everything-as-code’ model, where not only applications, but networks, compute infrastructure, security policy, build and release pipelines, etc. are written ‘as code’
  • Enterprise-scale concerns like quality, security and compliance are moving from an ‘audit model’ to a ‘continuous model’.

A blueprint for transformation

Each of these is expanded upon in the report, which also assesses in detail the six key Enterprise DevOps challenges and how they can be addressed. We’ve used real use cases to illustrate how some enterprises have transformed their DevOps practices in each area.

The report’s recommendations can be used as a blueprint to accelerate DevOps transformation with all the ensuing business benefits that this will bring. It’s been a great collaboration between Sogeti and Microsoft that I hope we’ll repeat in a year’s time to track the progress of Enterprise DevOps transformation.

 

Download the Enterprise DevOps Report 2020-21

 

Clemens Reijnen
Clemens Reijnen
Global CTO of Cloud Services
+31 347 226 913