With only 17% of organisations mature in Agile, need for different perspective for Devsecops for IT of Traditional Enterprises
Are your Digital or Enterprise IT Projects schedules, costs and ROI impacted by the lack of IT capacity and support for your IT Projects & Programmes? Are the Project timelines slipping despite having latest and shiny automated deployment and distribution tools, virtualisation and cloud? Maybe you are one of those who thinks Devops is not for you or Devops is only for #agile methodology oriented projects or only for software and application developers. Read on if you are an IT Leader seeking to formulate #Devops Operating Model and Strategy first before you invest to streamline your People, Organisations, Processes & Workflows, and Technology & Tools.
Devops is a term coined by the #Software industry. For example, according to #Atlassian, DevOps is a set of practices that automates the processes between software development and IT teams, in order that they can build, test, and release software faster and more reliably. It was purely a software related issue for the SaaS or pure-play Digital companies since they started off from the cloud and catered to the most modern type of application.
The issues affecting traditional Enterprise IT is vastly different though. Traditional Enterprise IT has to cater to the demands of Digitalisation Projects, Digital Projects, and Traditional applications enhancement projects, Modernisation or Transformation Projects, Separation projects for divestitures or Unifying projects for Mergers & Acquisitions. Given the varied nature of Projects, they would be using the most appropriate Project methodology to execute them ranging from #Waterfall or #SDLC or #PRINCE2 or Agile. Applying a “One size fits all” approach is not right for traditional Enterprise IT since they would be running a variety of IT Environments starting from legacy to virtualised to cloud or even multiple Applications & Software code & configuration management tools that is most appropriate for the technologies being used.
Support for IT Projects was not an issue in the early 90's as human and technology resources were budgeted and provided since organisations were in an investment mode. Support was not an issue when a traditional Enterprise created a Digital twin since the budgets for Projects support was included. However, the lack of disciplined Production deployment resulted in poor reliability, reduced availability, unbearable performance, higher incidents resulting in production work overload, bug-fixing overload due to poor quality testing and overall, pathetic end user experience.
The issue of capacity & support for IT Projects in traditional enterprises is more acute than for SaaS or pure-play Digital companies. Some of these are: uncertain number of IT Projects and its demand forecast, many nascent/emerging/mature technological trends which in turn resulted in uncertain capacity forecast for People, Technologies & Infrastructure, Software licenses and tools. There is a budget for RUN since capacity baselines and an Operating Model is in place. There is now a need to put in place a robust Strategy and Operating Model for support of IT Projects, which you may choose to call as Devops.
Before coming up with a Strategy and Target Operating Model for Devops, it is important to understand the needs and wants of the IT Programmes & Projects representing CHANGE, the Production support issues representing RUN, the architecture and standards representing GOVERNANCE. Here is a high level perspective on what IT Projects really need:
The Production teams work on one stable environment comprising Production and its mirror Disaster recovery environment and react to an incident. However, Projects works on multiple environments comprising Development, Systems Test, Functional Tests, Security & Recovery tests, User Acceptance tests and Training to name just a few. To avoid capacity sprawl and security issues of stranded environments, an E2E Application environment provision and de-provision capability will be needed. Just imagine the complexity when it is an Enhancement project which requires environments not just for the “As Is” but also for the planned new SaaS applications when it is on-premise. It is all the more complicated when the business has instigated a major separation or divestment or a merger or acquisition. Code versions control, code change and release complexity increases in traditional enterprises when the underlying systems software versions are upgraded as part of a project.
Traditional enterprises use hybrid of Project methodologies depending on the nature of the project. Waterfall with PRINCE2 or PMI would still be in use when it is new capability introduction which requires full-blown capabilities, Agile could be in use when requirements are not fully known or when a capability is to be ramped up gradually based on risks and returns. Enhancement projects could employ one or both depending on business needs. Just focusing on Devops for Agile projects will only cater to limited needs. Irrespective of nature of the project, the common outcomes are ROI, Business agility, competitiveness and expanded market share. According to this research article, only 17% of organisations are mature in Agile and 33% are in Early adoption - pilot stages.
From the above, it is very clear that traditional enterprises deal with more of Devops complexity comprising legacy as well as modern cloud as opposed to the pure-play Digital companies who purely have a need for seamless support and production service introduction just from a software perspective. You cannot afford to leave non-agile projects in the lurch. The Devops TOM (Target Operating Model) and implementation Strategy has to be tailored differently for traditional enterprises. Here is an example of one of the models:
The above model would be applicable for an organisation, which has a mixed bag of IT Development projects with deployment on mixed IT environments and when agility is demanded across all of them. You may not have any legacy enhancements or extensions and choose to have Devops only for Projects with Agile Methodologies or those that are only Cloud based. The choice of models would be dependent on:
– Complexity, Nature and Number of IT Projects
– Complexity and Nature of Application Environments (Bespoke/Traditional/SaaS)
– Complexity of integration and IT Infrastructure (Legacy, Virtual, Cloud)
– The financials and budget management structure
One of the major aspects of Devops strategy would be Service Integration and Service Levels for Devops since this would be considerably different to what is normally practised for Production. Service Levels to be considered, apart from typical ITIL service levels, as part of Devops strategy are given below. Devops would require unique SLA/KPI and few examples are given below.
– IT Projects to provide scale, sizing and timelines for application environments
– E2E Application environment mapping, Application environment configuration
– Provisioning and Deprovisioning SLA, Security validation
– Application code deployment certainty, Application code versioning accuracy
– Testing and QA, completion and environment returns
– Percentage of stranded environment & recovery, automated vs. manual deployment
– Self service, Change and Release, Continuous integration & deployment efficacy
The Devops Strategy can only be implemented on the basis of a robust business case. The business case rests on 3 pillars, viz., Certainty of CHANGE ROI, Certainty of the Projects business benefits and Lowest impact to Production and Security. In order to estimate the costs of Devops, you have to consider the number and complexity of projects and the number and complexity of application environments. Once you have them, you can build a business case based on Production and Projects support costs optimisation.
Recommendations to Devops Service providers
Projects carry an element of uncertainty. Projects, by nature, are expected to respond to changing business environment, customer demands and therefore, change of requirements. IT is one of the cogs in the wheel and since technology brings in the greatest benefits, there has to be a robust Operating Model that caters to the IT Projects that may demand an Application environment or support or introduction of the service into Production. This support is all encompassing and not a silo'ed ask – not just servers or VMs, not just storage, not just database, not just network or access requirements and not just an application code or software release management. An E2E holistic vision and approach for Devops service fulfilment is necessary to meet the needs of IT Projects.
Recommendations to Customers and Sourcing Advisors
IT or Digital Projects do not just need application code to be deployed and distributed often. They also need the underpinning software components that make up the applications as well the Interfacing layers, Security, Identity, Network and capacity to host them all. Having a holistic understanding of the needs of IT Projects must be at the heart of a Devops strategy, Operating Model and business case.
Conclusion
As Enterprises reduce RUN budgets and invest in CHANGE in order to be competitive as well as grow their market-share, it is imperative to have a robust and holistically thought-out Devops model to ensure businesses ROI expectations from Digital/IT projects are achieved. Service transparency is a core tenet of Devops Service Integration. Some insights are available from this article below.
About the Author
This article was first published by Jagadish Rao Raghavendra on December 18, 2017
Jagadish is a Strategic Board adviser, senior Executive leader with specialisation in reimagining business models; who has been successful at building and/or turnaround Practice advisory, Presales, Sales enablement, Solution consulting capabilities for:
- Applications & Enterprise applications
- Modernising and Transformation to a secure hybrid Cloud
- Service Integration and Management in a multi-cloud environment
- Digital workplace solutions
- Digital transformation using IoT, IIoT, Big Data, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Drones and Robots
- IT Infrastructure services
More recently, Jagadish has influenced re-imagining a digitally enabled business model for a leading enterprise
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