Earlier this month, we attended Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference. We spoke with hundreds of attendees and had the opportunity to attend many motivating and exciting sessions. One session that we found particularly thought-provoking, the Gartner Keynote, Applications and Infrastructure and Operations: When Worlds Collide, focused on the idea of change in organizations—mainly changes occurring in the form of bimodal approaches and DevOps initiatives. The keynote utilized the hashtag #changeisthegame to stimulate conversations on social media about the session, and this inspired us to talk about the importance of DevOps in today’s organizations and highlight the key role that automation can play in these initiatives.
Businesses today aren’t the same as they’ve been in the past—we are seeing operations and business processes today that are faster, more complex, and require more attention than we have ever seen. Business and IT agility increased drastically, and it needs to stay this way in order to stay up with the ever growing demands of frequent application releases, ongoing business and IT innovation, and the constant need for more time, documentation, training, and data security. This is why the Data Center keynote told us that the future organizational structure to look to is one that is both cross-functional and bimodal. A bimodal structure consists of two different modes —one that focuses on predictability and renovating your current processes, and a second “exploratory” phase that involves experimentation, troubleshooting, problem solving and more.
To stay up-to-date with these changes, more and more organizations are implementing their own DevOps initiatives. According to the keynote, DevOps formally is a “perspective that requires cultural change, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile, lean practices in the context of an integrated approach.” A DevOps initiative is one that increases the amount of collaboration between the development and operations teams and benefits and highlights the overall company culture, which the keynote referred to as the backbone of any organization. If your initiatives don’t support and improve the company culture—it could mean that your initiative won’t last. They also emphasized the importance of technology in a DevOps initiative, “especially automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective.”
Here are some of the facts that stood out to us during the keynote presentation:
- 90% of IT organizations attempting to use DevOps without specifically addressing their cultural foundations will fail
- 80% of the risks associated with attaining DevOps program objectives will stem from how organizational change is managed
- A software company can now meet 60% more development demand
- Banks see over 50% increased ability to meet demand from business
- Food services organization saved millions of dollars on savings through automation, cost avoidance and decreasing downtime
These facts further support that changes are occurring. The pace of business is moving faster than ever before and expectations are higher than ever. Organizations must stay competitive with the global environment in order to stay relevant. More and more businesses are turning to DevOps and taking a bimodal approach to their business and IT processes to stay strong in today’s market—in fact the keynote told us that by the end of 2016 and 2017, 35% of organizations plan to implement DevOps into their organization, while 38% are already utilizing DevOps for either production systems or their pilot phase.
To learn more about workload automation in the bimodal era, check out our eBook:
