Dev-Ops for Business Growth, Benefits?

As more organizations realize the benefits of DevOps, we’re seeing a paradigm shift in how the IT business community harnesses DevOps to ensure efficient and timely delivery. A DevOps anchored model holds much promise in the future for business enterprises of all types, regardless of the dependency business operations have on their IT infrastructure.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is the agile-scrum development methodology hinged to a seamless collaboration between the developers and the IT operations team.

Agility and collaboration are of utmost importance here. Collaborative efforts within the IT ecosystem (i.e., the development and IT operations teams) ensure a productive product or solution lifecycle, and, in the process, enhance ROI. From conceptualization, coding, reviewing, and quality assurance, to deployment,

monitoring and, support and maintenance, the synergy between the development and the IT operations teams will go a long way in accruing the benefits of the agile development methodology. Among the immediate benefits are reducing latency from the development-to-delivery cycle leading to faster time-to-market as well as currency in the marketing of all offerings, which means more visibility and increased adoption of the service offering or solution. This enables increased patronage and brand recognition and association, which, when combined, can result in increased revenues and profitability.

But how can DevOps help to establish a more efficient data and analytics-driven business culture for most enterprises? One can argue that the big data way is not the be-all and end-all. In fact, like DevOps, it is still in the nascent stages of its development as a full-blown IT strategy or practice. Since real-time data analytics—the off-shoot of big data analytics—is increasingly proving to be the fulcrum of business decision-making, DevOps with its omni-present and omni-productive “self” is a perfect complement to analytics.

How and when is not difficult to decipher. Faster time-to-market (i.e., faster delivery of features and functionalities in a relatively stable operating environment) allows for more time to add value to the product or service being offered. This is possible with the application of real-time analytics at every interaction that the end-customer has with the business. Every digital footprint the interaction leaves is a source for introspection, review, and course-correction — or simply, to offer more value, e.g., a superior user experience. This can be determined through analytics on streaming data, which can be used to find actionable insights such as to identify an imminent business opportunity, or a concern buried in the type of behavior or interaction needing immediate attention, and so on.

The actionable aspects that relate to an IT solution, offering, or a business process enabled by IT, can be easily addressed if one has adopted the DevOps culture in the enterprise.

The scenario could look something like the one depicted in the image below.

As we can see, this can be a win-win situation for all types of stakeholders: the DevOps team, the business decision-makers and, the customers. Analytics can enable decision-making geared towards course-correction or feature(s) addition(s). DevOps can facilitate the fruition of those decisions and the most important entity, the customer, can avail the benefits of the engagement with the brand or product or service.

– Vikas