Published on the 18/07/2016 | Written by Donovan Jackson
‘Know thy enemy’ in the digital disruption battle…
Unconstrained by 50 or 60 years of legacy business models and restrictive approaches to developing business applications, digital disruptors like Uber are able to ‘do things right the first time’. That ability, in turn, rests on a secret weapon: DevOps.
And for those threatened with disruption, fighting back depends on adopting the methods being put to such effective use by these new competitors.
That’s according to Peter Doherty, principal solutions consultant APJ at ServiceNow. Speaking on the sidelines of the recent ITx conference in Wellington, Doherty said DevOps is behind the ability of disruptors to bring core and new services quickly to market, with a ‘conceptualise/develop/test/release’ cycle taking place in a fraction of the time consumed by traditional methods of application development.
DevOps is regarded as much as a culture as it is a method. It combines disciplines from the development, quality assurance and operations teams to accelerate the creation of functional software.
It may be a tired example of a disruptor, but Uber is a gift that keeps giving. Having proved the concept of acting as a broker between those needing something done and those who can do it, the company is looking at ways to expand its influence and, with UberEats, it is quite literally looking to help eat some lunch. For its customers this time, not that of competitors.
Doherty explained: “DevOps is helping disruptors bring services into being very quickly. Uber now offers to fetch your lunch. The way they develop that service is to conceptualise it, create it and release it to a defined control group while ironing out issues as they go. If it works, it goes out to general release, if it doesn’t, they get rid of it quickly. The whole cycle takes weeks.”
Compare that with traditional methods, where merely floating an idea could take months.
DevOps needn’t be the preserve of the disruptors. Instead, said Doherty, it should be the means by which the traditionalists can fight back.
But, being a culture thing, DevOps is by its very nature scary to old school organisations. “Traditional organisations tend to be strict in their application of service management. For them, releases tend to be big chunks of work which involve cumbersome change management and the guardians of product management making sure everything works in that big release.”
By comparison, he said DevOps means small, incremental changes with frequent releases – sometimes as often as daily – to select groups, with testing taking place in live environments. Each release on its own represents a small risk which can be addressed in that live environment or rolled back with relative ease if serious problems surface.“Service management people find this very scary. It requires a change in mindset.”
Part of that mindset change is governance, which Doherty said cannot be abdicated. “IT thinks they own the business risk, but they don’t – the business does. But the business doesn’t have enough information [from the IT department], so, to them, everything is risky.”
With DevOps, said Doherty, the bringing together of operations, developers and testers directly addresses this governance issue as it foments a clearer understanding of the level of risk.
As demonstrated by the disruptors, there can no longer be a separation of the disciplines of information technology and business. Or, as Doherty put it, “These days, the business is IT.”
