DevOps may have missed a key alignment between Dev and Ops responsibilities and ways of working.

DevOps aims to help IT organizations align the speed and innovation coming from agile development teams with the performance, reliability, and security sought after by Ops. And technology practices like CI/CD, IaC, and AIOps, along with the mindset of continuous planning, shift-left security, and continuous testing practices, have shown incredible value to businesses executing digital transformations. IT departments using these practices have increased deployment frequencies, improved the MTTR of major incidents, reduced cycle times, and delivered new innovations while driving efficiencies.

So here’s my question. Are we ready to say that IT has reached its peak performance?

Some IT leaders in smaller organizations and startups may be close. With less legacy and technical debt, with more cloud-native architectures built ground up with DevOps principles, and with people and processes developed from an aligned starting point, then you can get pretty close to a utopian DevOps.

But most organizations are somewhere on a journey. Every sprint brings these organizations a few steps closer, and many will see results.

DevOps Organization or Digital Organization?

But there’s one hurdle in aligning not just Dev and Ops together. Today, most organizations recognize the importance of test automation, SRE disciplines, architecture, security, and other tech functions whose acronyms were missed in the original calling.

And then there are

• Analytics and data functions including data scientists, data engineers, and governance functions
• Product management functions, especially product owners
• Design thinking and innovation functions in UX and UI specialists
• PMO functions including program management and six-sigma process specialists

Are they not needed for the collaboration to bring tech, data, experience, and innovation while balancing reliability, performance, security, and governance?  Notice, I now expanded the scope from my first DevOps description, which didn’t include data, experience, and governance.

And with these responsibilities included, we’re now getting closer to what I call a Digital Organization – a higher level and strategically important level of collaboration that all businesses require today.

The Big Tech Issue: Transform from IT to Digital Orgs

It’s in this spirit that I share with you this week’s 5 Minutes with @NYIke video. I point out a major problem in DevOps and a major challenge for medium and large organizations in shifting from IT to DevOps to Digital Organizations. Please consider subscribing to the channel!

In this video, I start with tech – not people, processes, or culture. I’ll get to those aspects of digital organizations in future videos and posts. Here’s how to contact me if you have questions or comments!