Digital transformation is essentially the process of combining technology with all aspects of a business to replace manual processes and change the way your organization operates. Whereas DevOps is a philosophy or practice that allows businesses to deliver services or applications at a faster pace in comparison to companies utilizing traditional and outdated software development or management processes.
DevOps can help organizations enhance their digital transformation strategy by paving the way for experimentation and continuous change. It ensures that there are no disparities between operations and development departments. This leads to better results in terms of creating a seamless workflow and productivity.
Here are 8 ways in which DevOps aids in Digital Transformation:
Brings Together People, Process, and Technology:
DevOps enables businesses to deliver new products to their customers at a faster pace and allows them to grow digitally. It brings together people, processes, and technology in a way that contributes to the relevant business goals. It prevents companies from wasting hidden resources whether these are people or tools by focusing on what needs to be prioritized for facilitating digital transformation. This helps free resources that were being wasted on low priority tasks and shift them on to essential and critical tasks. Without DevOps, Digital transformation efforts can become more laborious for organizations.
Helps Businesses Understand New Systems:
DevOps plays a major role in encouraging businesses to learn about new models for increasing their productivity and performance on the digital front. This learning can help businesses stay ahead of the competition. The DevOps philosophy focuses on optimizing an idea till it is deployed by providing the right frameworks to organizations. It allows businesses to focus on their goals and utilize the right kind of tools to resolve issues. With endless tools available in the market, DevOps allows businesses to streamline and be clear about what they need to achieve their objectives.
Encourages Adoption of Better Solutions:
A major advantage of using DevOps is that it enables organizations to self-steer towards better solutions. It makes the company’s IT department more dynamic, transparent, and flexible. It allows companies to alter their IT infrastructure and make positive changes to their services or software applications. As a result, all the sectors within the company become much more productive. DevOps’ role in digital transformation is to ensure that all improvements to applications and IT infrastructure creation and implementation are made from version control code, enabling traceability back to version control and removing the complexity of manual configuration
Enables Continuous changes:
The main goal of digital transformation is to enable businesses to acquire more customers and move quicker. To do so companies adopt cloud services and employ microservices to improve their architectures. However, without a proper method, system, and culture that allows companies to grow continuously and keep making changes, it is difficult to move forward with digital transformation. Compared to other systems, DevOps can facilitate change better. DevOps is all about constantly advancing and developing new capabilities to ensure delivery as requested by the customer.
Disrupts the Traditional Mindset:
DevOps boosts digital transformation by breaking down silos and organizational structures. To make the process of digital transformation successful the entire organization needs to adopt new business practices instead of sticking with the traditional practices such as slow outdated processes or annual planning cycles. DevOps provides a new culture wherein development teams can get better insights on what works or does not work for the company, helps them speed up improvements, and allows the organization to embrace changes. With no fixed hierarchy, power is distributed to all within the DevOps system and all get a chance to contribute.
Improves Customer Satisfaction:
In the present digital world, speed and being responsive is vital to succeeding in the market. DevOps builds an organization’s ability from an organizational as well as a technological perspective to deal with the increasing need for speed and understanding complexities. DevOps facilitates digital transformation by making system deliveries faster, cost-effective, and reliable by helping companies evolve their systems and reduce wastage involved in the process. This model also improves the service quality for customers and other stakeholders. It ensures that all the issues are resolved before the customers report them. These factors ultimately keep customers satisfied and engaged with the company.
Optimizes Automation:
Automation is used by DevOps implementations to speed up the delivery of IT services and increase the standardization of systems and processes used to create, test, and operate new software applications. Companies willing to invest in a DevOps model will deploy code more regularly and with fewer errors, which in turn speeds up the time to market for new and modified software applications. However, automation comes with its own set of issues and needs to be monitored regularly. DevOps optimizes automation by shortening feedback loops, encouraging experimentation and continuous learning, and increasing flow.
Removes Barriers to Innovation:
Due to the restrictive nature of IT operations, the creativity and innovation required for digital transformation get stifled. Without rethinking digital strategies and making radical changes, it is impossible for organizations to succeed. DevOps accelerates digital transformation with an emphasis on innovation by eliminating obstacles to creativity, mainly the fear of failure. This model encourages the philosophy of failing fast and failing often so that companies can quickly remove unproductive practices early on. This approach encourages team members to carry out experiments, take risks, and work on new ideas.
There is no one-and-done procedure for digital transformation. It’s an iterative process in which businesses are continuously searching for innovative ways to utilize technology to enhance the experiences of their customers and the bottom line of the company.
While it can be challenging to incorporate DevOps, it is impossible to succeed with your digital transformation efforts without it. The current pandemic has made businesses understand the need for digital transformation and companies are trying to take more initiatives on the digital front. To build agility and speed up these initiatives organizations need to turn to DevOps. It breaks down silos, automates processes that consume resources, and aligns the entire company with common objectives.
