DevOps Implementation Practice: The Disconnect between Expectation and Delivery

You’ve been tasked with urgently leading the implementation of the DevOps capability that’ll help your company meet the competitive challenges of the transforming business environment. You’re desperately looking for clear information about how to implement DevOps in a way that makes your business competitive.

It’s with that goal in mind that, executives of European leading firms in industries as prestigious as financial services, aerospace, aviation, energy, telecommunication, and more like them, attended the recent Econocom’s summit on March 15th in Toulouse, France.

I was invited as the main speaker to give four keynote speeches in French

• Keynote speech #1 – DevOps: Myths and Realities
• Keynote speech #2 – Assess Your DevOps Practices Maturity and Make Your Business Competitive
• Keynote speech #3 – Enterprise Cloud: Cloud’s Second Act is Business-Oriented
• Keynote speech #4 – Transform Your IT Operations with AIOps to Take Your DevOps Capability to the Next Level.

Here are the lessons learned and key takeways!

Do Not Narrow DevOps to Continuous Delivery (CD) Toolchain and Agile Practices, It’s More Than That

“DevOps in the near future will be out of control of IT. If you carefully analyze its objectives, principles, structure, and tools, and map it to the competitive requirements of the rising digital economy, you’ll realize that it’s a business operational model that transcends software deployment concerns.”

Figure 1– Philippe Abdoulaye speaking to Econocom’s experts one day before the conference

“Many before me noticed that fact including Ernest Mueller author of DevOps: It’s not Chef and Puppet and Agile and Lean are the Foundations of DevOps.”

Many Particularly in the IT Community Talk about Business Value, Few Understand Its Concrete Meaning

“Technology on its own has never created business value. What creates value is a well-optimized value chain enabled by a well-engineered technology platform. ”

Figure 2– Philippe Abdoulaye speaking to Econocom’s experts one day before the conference

“That’s a Michael E. Porter lesson we all should remember. Porter has revolutionized strategic thinking as well as the way businesses create value. IT solutions vendors should be more humble and stop telling business leaders what they want to hear but tell them what they must understand.”

DevOps Will Be Out of Control of IT Soon, It’s Primarily a Business Operational Model, Not Only a Software Continuous Deployment Capability

“Joe McKendrick one of the top cloud thought leader in his remarkable, Actual Business Value of DevOps and Agile Practices Still Elusive Survey Suggests, substantiates the fact that implementing CD infrastructure for the sake of implementing it doesn’t make sense.”

Figure 3– High-level of DevOps deployed across the business operational model

“If you map DevOps’ philosophy, principles, structures, and practices to the requirements of the changing competitive environments, you’ll realize that it’s primarily a business operational model that seeks to make the business competitive and not only an IT capability. The time to take DevOps to its next maturity level and derive the promised business benefits is now.”

Implementing DevOps as a CD Infrastructure Doesn’t Make Sense, If There’s No Tangible Business Benefits

Participants admitted that deploying DevOps starting with CD toolchain implementation and ignoring the operational model — actually the business value chain — optimization is a strategic mistake that’ll boost IT performance without significant impacts on business benefits.

Figure 4– Philippe Abdoulaye assessing maturity level of participants’ practices

IT executives of global businesses in areas as prestigious as financial services, aerospace, aviation, energy, answering questionnaire to get the maturity level of their DevOps practices assessed.

Mission Accomplished!!!

My greatest satisfaction is, participants agreed that optimizing the business operational model should be the top priority as it’s where all business benefits are created.

Mission accomplished, they all decided to urgently change their DevOps implementation strategy by focusing primarily on the optimization of their operational model and get more executive involvement and commitment to make things happen.

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