Decision-makers are increasingly aware of the term DevOps (development operations) and the potential impact it can have on enhancing business operations.
This signifies a shift in how business and technology will more effectively work together in the years to come, writes Jannie Pretorius, professional services manager at Elingo.
In the most basic terms, DevOps is a deployment framework that holistically looks at things from an end-to-end rather than segmented perspective. It emphasis communication and collaboration between teams. For some, this presents a natural evolution of an Agile approach.
DevOps throws away the traditional silo outlook of having different teams responsible for different things. These can include everything from software implementation, testing, and maintenance, to development, planning, and management. DevOps is all about a single team fulfilling in all aspects of the development cycle.

Driving efficiency
According to the 2016 State of DevOps Report, companies using DevOps deploy solutions 200 times more frequently than those who do not. Imagine the difference in stakeholder experience when those organisations compete against each other for the same customers. It is therefore increasingly vital to adopt DevOps across a business if it is to stay relevant in the real-time digital world.
As is evident by the report, one of the biggest advantages of going the DevOps route is the improvement in time to deployment. It also enables companies to use smaller, more focused development teams.
A resultant benefit of this is how much more frequently innovation takes place. This is because teams can release new features and functionality into the business more often. Past approaches meant that new features were typically only introduced one or twice a year. With DevOps, there is potential to do it far more regularly.
Because teams are more focused on total development, failure rates will also drastically reduce. Using DevOps, teams have sight of the entirety of the solution and not just elements of it. More people can therefore be used to help overcome any obstacles with fault tolerance drastically reduced.

Migrating to DevOps
Ultimately, any good organisational shift will be focused on implementing an approach as a profit centre and not a cost centre. DevOps enables this but there must be a desire from the executives to do so. The leadership must buy into this new way of doing things and embrace it to improve efficiencies in the organisation.
The report further shows that organisations that embrace DevOps spend 22% less time on unplanned work and rework. This means they can spend 29% more time on new work that includes adding new features or code.
Companies who want to remain innovative in everything they do, simply must find a way of embracing DevOps if they have not done so already. Technology is evolving at a rapid rate with the average system being used at a company assuming there is a programmer managing it.
What was once considered complicated as recently as a few years ago, has become commonplace. One of the great things about DevOps is that it is already being implemented at many organisations without many people being aware that they are using it.