Over the past several years, a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift has occurred in the marketplace creating a digital economy where businesses must leverage software to create innovation or face a major risk of becoming obsolete. This shift has transferred the innovation focus to software. Software success is increasingly indistinguishable from business success and all business innovation requires new software, changes to software, or both.
With this shift to software as a driver for business innovation, large traditional organizations are finding that their current approaches to managing and delivering software is limiting their ability to respond to the business as quickly as the business requires. The current state of software delivery is characterized by:
- Heavyweight, linear-sequential development and delivery software practices.
- Large, infrequent software releases supported by complex and manual processes for testing and deploying software.
- Overly complex and tightly-coupled application infrastructures.
- The perception of security, compliance, and performance as an after-thought and a barrier to business activity and innovation
These approaches can no longer scale to meet the requirements of the business. Many existing software practices tend to create large amounts of technical debt and rework while inhibiting adoption of new technologies. A lack of skilled development, testing, and delivery personnel means that manual efforts cannot scale, and many organizations struggle to release software in a repeatable and reliable manner. This current state has given rise to the “DevOps” movement, which seeks to deliver better business outcomes by implementing a set of cultural norms and technical practices that enables IT organizations to innovate faster with less risk.
I’ve talked to a lot of different companies and a lot of people are struggling trying to get everyone in their organization to agree on what is “DevOps, where to start, and how to drive improvements over time. With that in mind, I have asked Gary Gruver, author of “Starting and Scaling DevOps in the Enterprise” to join me on the Micro Focus DevOps Drive-in on Thursday, January 26th at 9 am PT. Gary will discuss where to start your DevOps journey and present his latest recommendations from his new book. Don’t miss this opportunity to ask Gary your questions about how to implement DevOps in your enterprise IT organization. When you register, you’ll get the first 3 chapters of his book. If you read the first 3 chapters, we will send you the full version.
