Creating diverse partnerships to further business opportunities remains a big challenge for organisations today. Agility / DevOps in the business context encourage businesses to respond to rapid changes in the internal and external environment, without losing sight of the overall vision and momentum.
DevOps seeks to drive increased levels of collaboration between developers and operations, much like the way Agile values ‘Individuals and interactions over processes and tools’.
Peter Alkema, CIO of FNB Business, explains that “The concept of DevOps emerged from having to find more efficient, agile and collaborative approaches to IT operations in the work place. It requires organisations to create agile system support teams and create ongoing feedback mechanisms between development and operations staff throughout all stages of the development lifecycle.”
The system operations environment has become increasingly more important in our service-oriented world. He adds that “organisations need to be flexible, maintain balance and efficient in managing change within the business environment.” Thomas Enoch, VP of Customer Success at Chef explains in his talk about human tribes that ‘is it crucial to bring people together, understand each other’s unique perspectives and if you have to be different or identify with your tribe, then wear a silly hat’.
Alkema believes that, “by bringing cross-functional IT teams together through events like the FNB codeFest will drive better-built, better-run software; something all of us in the industry strive for.”
Leadership participation and support in sponsoring these agile interventions creates the desired engagement that is required. Innovation will happen with agility, results will become visible, the message will easily spread and collaboration between teams and people will bring change in the organisation.
We have to address the friction in large organisations and find fresh, faster, disruptive ways of doing things better to deliver great software for our businesses. “Agile / DevOps is a new model of building and running IT which we need to drive stronger than ever as the urgency of disrupting old models intensifies. Experienced practitioners already know this. Showcasing this agility through event-driven innovation like a codeFest has created a platform that has allowed business stakeholders to be more involved which makes the experience powerfully real,” concludes Alkema.
