DevOps has been on the top of my mind lately, thanks to plenty of inspiration from the recent all-day DevOps Conference. Now that we’ve got some real data and case studies showing what DevOps can do, the business case is easier to make for IT departments that haven’t yet made the transition (even if they’ve put in their requests to the CEO or COO).
When highly-regulated enterprise organizations are able to get development cycles running 10 times faster and months-long processes are shrunk down to mere minutes, calling it ‘disruptive’ isn’t just a cliché.
(There are many companies just now becoming aware of the importance of DevOps for their own operations. Gartner analysts recently showed just how fast this is growing: “By 2016, DevOps will evolve from a niche strategy employed by large cloud providers to a mainstream strategy employed by 25 percent of Global 2000 organizations… DevOps is a philosophy, a cultural shift that merges operations with development and demands a linked toolchain of technologies to facilitate collaborative change.”)
With that in mind, I do have some advice for those IT managers looking to put that business case to high-level stakeholders (so that they can go to a trusted specialist like SwitchedLink to make it happen): don’t forget to make the business case – not just a technical argument.
Andi Mann hit on this exact point in the summer in a great DevOps-themed article,
All too often organizations measure activity, but fail to align application delivery with business goals. As one customer recently told me, “Shipping crappy releases faster won’t help.” Business stakeholders especially are looking for business KPIs…
He then goes on to list a dozen or so such KPIs, such as user signups, customer satisfaction, cart fulfillment, etc. (he could have tripled that list, easily, but the point was made). You have to highlight positive ROI, not just potential cost savings, risk management and efficiencies.
For those of us with experience in IT and data security, this is a familiar challenge: companies need a certain level of security, but quantifying how much and at what cost is hard. Companies could (and should) take the strategic view, looking at risk management for their business operations and what even a few lost days (or weeks) of production could cost, aside from reputation loss in the event of a privacy breach.
But many times, CEOs and COOs just don’t have the bandwidth or commitment to do that. They just throw a budget for security at their IT department (based on what they did the year before, or what another company is doing) and let the department handle it without any real direction or oversight. Applying this backwards approach on security to DevOps is at best, unwise.
Explaining the business case for DevOps and Agile development is a continuous process
For internal IT managers who are keen on working closely with the leadership team, DevOps represents an ongoing opportunity for deeper engagement and for showcasing the value of what they’re doing. It’s an opportunity, not just a challenge.
That comes through clearly in the comments from one presenter at the recent Gartner symposium in Barcelona that delved deeply into DevOps and continuous development. Carlos Goncalves is Global CIO of Societe Generale, a bank that has already seen considerable improvements thanks to DevOps (in a sector that is as highly regulated, reliant on legacy technology and generally seen as conservative when it comes to technological innovation).
Goncalves emphasizes that when he is speaking to the business leaders in the organization, he needs to be able to justify the work with projected ROI on an ongoing basis. Practically, that means a DevOps team might present a progress report every week to business owners so they can see and be engaged in the improvements to the business.
“We prioritize the business cases where the ROI will occur in the same year,” Goncalves says. “It’s no longer a question of how to convince people that we should do DevOps and Continuous Delivery, but a matter of when and in what sequence.”
It matters that DevOps could reduce the time that a software engineer needs to be dedicated to a project by a factor of 10. Time is money. As well, another key metric for any established business model is the cost of customer acquisition (ie. real money spent aquiring each customer). Usually a marketing unit knows exactly what this cost is per customer. When a software product fails to deliver, either as a platform delivering product to the customer, or as the product itself, that customer is lost. The cost to acquire that customer is lost also. DevOps can help optimize this process as well and reduce these losses.
Better efficiency from DevOps is a means to an end. The ultimate goal is higher sales, better conversions, happier customers, or some other positive outcome outside of the cost center. When making the case, always be thinking about how to present that upside.
