The Doppler Quarterly Summer 2019 | Page 28

DevOps: Embrace the Cultural Change To effectively leverage cloud capabilities, successful organi- zations undertake initiatives to make their cultures more agile. This involves extensive work in the three classic dimensions of IT – technology, process and people. A lot of this work should begin as a cloud project gets off the ground. During these early stages, how the three dimen- sions of IT will need to change is driven by the alignment of the overall business strategy with the current level of adop- tion of the tenets of DevOps: automation, continuous improvement, iteration and fast feedback loops. More mature cloud projects should be pushing these factors ahead, and already witnessing cultural changes aligned with accelerated delivery throughput. On the technology front, organizations typically start by picking an initial set of tools to support automation and/or DevOps itself. This list of tools grows to sup- port security, testing, monitoring and aspects of the continuous inte- gration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipe- line. In addition, teams must choose between cloud-native and best- of-breed tooling. Once your enterprise begins to gain leverage with the cloud, inte- grating and optimizing these tools across the organization is essential. It is also critical to consider if the tools are func- tioning at a high level. Have you filled out your whole tech- nology stack? Is your organization appropriately skilled to leverage these tools? value out of the cloud, they need to drive further alignment with their DevOps procedures across the organization. Value stream mapping, or lean analysis, should be expanded to include governance and operational functions, with a focus on continually optimizing throughput. For example, ensuring that a standard DevOps deployment flow (and toolchain) is available for use across the organization, for all SDLC environment types, helps support this key cultural transformation. Furthermore, enterprises that typically operated in an ITIL- based data center environment now have to be updated to operate with more agility. You must determine the optimal mix of ITIL and Agile processes, in order to balance the operational guardrails with the deployment throughput expected. Deeper analysis of governance processes com- monly reaps the most added throughput. For example, the adoption or expansion of “standard” change requests can address a common hurdle for production deployments. It will take years to reach the optimal mix, requiring continual re-evaluation throughout the cloud adoption lifecycle. Organizations looking to drive value in the cloud often fall behind in terms of equipping their people to operate in the new environments. In terms of process, many companies will start creating DevOps capabilities in certain units or departments but not consider how these capabilities need to be developed and integrated throughout the entire organization. Companies often begin their value stream mapping in the development organization, followed by the infrastructure organization, but often get stuck there. As they look to generate greater 26 | THE DOPPLER | SUMMER 2019 Organizations looking to drive value in the cloud often fall behind in terms of equipping their people to operate in the new environments. The cloud requires differ- ent skill sets and a new array of tools. Most importantly, the cloud also requires a different attitude: a drive for continu- ous improvement. Have you assembled the right kind of team that embraces this culture of continuous improve- ment instead of a “hero culture” that requires individual members to make acrobatic saves to keep your project on track? Have you identified which skills exist inside the orga- nization, and which ones will have to be brought in as new hires or from third parties? Have you found cloud evange- lists in your organization, willing to embrace cloud and learn the new skills required? Have you rewarded, acknowledged or otherwise developed incentives to drive the new behav-