Many new technologies drive our world today. As a result, technology affects how businesses work and even how we do things as people. “Digital transformation” is the term widely used to describe how companies learn to adapt or grow to meet the needs of an ever-changing marketplace.
For example, a few decades ago, you would need a watch, an alarm clock, and a telephone — three separate gadgets to perform three separate tasks. But the case is different today. With just a smartphone, you can tell what the current time is, set an alarm that will wake you up tomorrow morning, and of course, make a phone call.
Digital transformation also affects businesses and large enterprises; with the advent of the cloud and modern Internet technologies. In this post, we'll learn how DevOps can be useful in digital transformation.
What Is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation, to put it simply, is the use of modern and emerging technologies in ways that help improve your business.
Digital transformation may vary across organizations. For example, digital transformation could be the shift from a manual process to a new digital method. Or it could be the move from using one technology to experimenting with or using bleeding-edge technology as an early adopter giving the business an edge.
Before an organization can embrace digital transformation, it must adopt the culture of trying new things or innovation. An organization must be willing to leave the old ways of doing things behind to try a new method that is still being formed.
What Is DevOps?
AWS defines DevOps as such: “DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to serve their customers better and compete more effectively in the market.”
DevOps is not just about tools or automation of processes. It is more than a solution or tool that can be purchased. Your organization may automate processes and still not fully benefit from DevOps. Using a continuous integration tool like Jenkins doesn't equal DevOps.
Modern cloud platforms can eliminate many bottlenecks associated with deploying modern software applications. A cloud service can also reduce the amount of time your team would spend configuring deployment environments. However, it's worth mentioning that just using “The Cloud” doesn't mean your organization is getting all the benefits of DevOps either.
Increased communication and collaboration between the development team and operations team is a big driver of what makes DevOps work.
DevOps as Part of Digital Transformation
In the traditional software release process, one team (the development team) writes, tests, and builds code in isolation. Next, the team hands off the code to the operations team for deployment and release. This practice, however, can lead to slower releases and poor customer experience.
DevOps reduces the issues associated with the traditional release process. For example, organizations can release in hours or days rather than weeks or months.
Digital transformation improves business processes using improvements in technology. It also creates new and improved processes that are driven by technology. DevOps brings software development processes and operational processes together. Because of this synergy, DevOps can help an organization with its digital transformation journey.
Here are five ways the DevOps process is useful in digital transformation.
1. Changing Cultural Mindset
Digital transformation should involve culture as well as technology. DevOps encourages teams to embrace automation of processes and to trust the pipeline. Tasks that are repeated should be automated. Automation can save the team time and reduce the possibility of error.
DevOps promotes more collaboration between teams. Development, operations, security, and other teams learn to collaborate more for the common goal of delivering high-quality products for their customers.
Changes in technology happen at a high-speed rate. Therefore, the use of automation and increased collaboration is critical for digital transformation to succeed. In addition, the cultural changes DevOps brings can increase the happiness and efficiency of teams.
Increased communication and collaboration between the development team and operations team is a big driver of what makes DevOps work.
2. Digital Transformation Reduces Cost
The following are some reasons that can cause software development to be expensive and inefficient:
- Isolation of multiple teams and departments involved in a project
- Repeated rework
- Unnecessary delays or waiting
As mentioned previously, DevOps brings the development and operation teams closer, hence reducing silos and decreasing the number of handoffs. Because teams work closer together, there is more understanding and less need to rework features. While practicing DevOps, the project teams don't have to wait long for the next piece of instruction to be made available. As a result, the amount of time that would be wasted is reduced.
Speed is important in digital transformation. Innovating fast and reducing the need to rework tasks can save organizations time and money.
3. Increase in Efficiency and the Creation of New Opportunities
DevOps puts an organization in a better position to experiment with new ideas. Such an experiment can help organizations learn about the patterns and practices that really work, making digital transformation more efficient.
DevOps can also help organizations discover new business opportunities that are enabled by digital transformation. Beyond making processes better, the use of technology can create brand-new opportunities, and DevOps enables rapid adoption of the tech.
4. Increase in Quality of Work
There is more room for error in a non-DevOps space. This is primarily due to fewer communications between teams. Digital transformation may introduce processes that reduce error; however, DevOps can help an organization benefit from such processes.
We already understand that DevOps promotes a culture of automation. Digital transformation, on the other hand, enables automation. By using automation, human error can be reduced in processes. Hence the overall quality of work is improved.
DevOps can also help organizations discover new business opportunities that are enabled by digital transformation.
5. Increase in Innovation
Last but not least, DevOps can increase innovation. For instance, automating repetitive tasks can save both the development and operations team a significant amount of time. Hence, the teams are more relaxed, happier, and better in mind to do more innovative activities.
While digital transformation enables innovation, DevOps encourages practices that create new innovations. It's impossible to have one without the other.
Summary
Digital transformation paired with DevOps practices allows businesses to modernize and adopt improvements in process and technology. A successful digital transformation involves a cultural shift that can lead to increased efficiency and saved time.
In the very fast-changing world we find ourselves in today, organizations must innovate quickly. DevOps makes digital transformation faster and reduces waste.
Organizations need to implement DevOps in order to get all of the benefits it brings to digital transformation. DevOps increases employee satisfaction and reduces the costs of building a product. To learn about how your organization can become more agile with DevOps and digital transformation, we recommend you check out Liatrio's Enterprise DevOps Transformation services.
