Only a handful of people in development or operations accounted for DevOps visionaries five years ago.
The movement has matured past the inertia point driven by the investments companies are making in cloud and container technology, according to T.J. Randall, VP of customer success at XebiaLabs.
Cloud and container have basically "knocked down" any of the infrastructure barriers that companies used to face, said Randall, in an interview with CIO Dive. Developers are accelerating product because industry has given them the tools to accelerate, which also means businesses have to consume those changes.
Companies are quick to boast of DevOps implementation, obscuring actual adoption. As the movement matures and becomes an enterprise staple, true implementation falls to the talent — the people with the skills to make the marriage of development and operations work.
Attracting people across functional areas, from developers to project managers to business leaders, has become more mainstream with more broad enterprise adoption, according to Eveline Oehrlich, independent research director at the DevOps Institute.
The DevOps Institute found 77% of the more than 1,600 people surveyed, who have DevOps and digital transformation-related skills, are leveraging or adopting DevOps, though at different stages.
As the DevOps movement matures and becomes an enterprise staple, true implementation falls to the talent — the people with the skills to make the marriage of development and operations work.
Adoption is most commonly found at the project level and 15% are in the planning or initial stages of DevOps. Almost 20% of respondents have attained enterprisewide adoption.
The challenge is ensuring DevOps lives up to its name.
Some organizations decide they're going to "do" DevOps. But businesses "can't really do DevOps and expect an outcome," said Oehrlich, in an interview with CIO Dive. "What you can do is create a product or a service, which achieves customer and employee experience satisfaction and that's done in a modern way through agility, speed, equality."
"It's nothing new, except we kind of lost that path," she said.
Top-down investment and the CIO archetype
Technology spreads through an enterprise in a different ways. Shadow IT can start small, as a grassroots movement in an IT organization. Groups individually adopt tools like Dropbox or Slack, responding to a specific project pain point.
In other cases, enterprisewide investment begins from business stakeholders, and trickles down, with leaders encouraging adoption and standardization.
DevOps requires a combination of top-down, and bottom-up implementation; retooling a business requires a cultural change.
Some organizations follow the bottom-up approach, but implementation gets stuck in the middle, according to Oehrlich.
DevOps requires a combination of top-down, and bottom-up implementation; retooling a business requires a cultural change.
With enterprise DevOps support often stemming from top-down for successful adoption, certain CIOs are more successful than others.
CIOs often fall into three archetypes according to Oehrlich:
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The utility CIO: They think of technology like a utility, plugging in systems, turning them on and acquiring services like electricity.
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The service provider: CIOs who think they are providing a service to the enterprise, with service level agreements and deliveries the organizations pay for.
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The business partner: These CIOs sit at the table and make strategic decisions, leveraging technology as business technology, not IT.
The CIOs who can really make DevOps tick are those who serve as a partner.
"As we're moving into the speed and the demand from customers and digitalization and IoT, these visionary CIOs are seeing that DevOps is not just a technology thing, it's really a way to deliver product to the customers or the clients or the patients in the speed and quality of what they wanted and what they need," said Oehrlich.
The most effective CIOs in facilitating DevOps adoption are those who trust and empower practitioners, knowing when to relinquish control and enable the organization.
The skills that give DevOps life
There is no one right way to adopt DevOps. Some organizations will have hoped for an expected outcomes, yet true success comes from enabling an organization to work in a more agile manner, in tandem with business partners.
Certain attributes are better than others. Automation, process and soft skills are considered the most important for DevOps, according to the DevOps Institute report. Business skills are considered most important for leaders.
Businesses want someone who understands process and operation across the organization and has an intuitive ability to put things together, according to Randall. "Automation is the place where everybody starts. That's actually the easier side."
What is more complex is the soft and process skills that make DevOps work.
The "people-process side of DevOps" requires practitioners showing teams why they should want to make improvements; "The ability to sell your peers on why your solution is valuable to them," Randall said.
