DevOps is considered by many to be one of the most impactful trends within IT in the last decade. The State of DevOps Report, presented by Puppet and the DevOps Research and Assessment Group (DORA), has been a leading research survey in this space for more than six years, informing CIOs and industry leaders about DevOps trends, high performing DevOps organisations and critical success factors.
The 2017 results found that DevOps practices are the foundation and enabler for business digital transformation, which minimises digital disruption and increases business competitiveness. Development teams that effectively utilise DevOps principles were found to achieve 46 times more frequent software deployments than their competitors.
Companies that effectively use DevOps recover faster from production and infrastructure outages, and are also better at preventing failures. In fact, they are 96 times faster in recovering from failures.
Lead time for changes is 440 times faster with DevOps. For IT and the organisation, this translates to a faster time to market, better customer experience, and higher responsiveness to market changes.
The other major finding in this year’s report was the value of automation to the success of DevOps. Teams that automate more of their configuration management, testing, deployments, and change approval processes were higher performing than other teams, which allowed for a faster feedback cycle and more time for innovation.
Transformational leadership is key
For the first time, the 2017 State of DevOps Report looked at leadership types and their impact on performance, with transformational leadership being closely linked to effective implementations of DevOps in a company.
When looking towards the future, CIOs and leaders will need to decide if they are going to focus their energy and time on leading digital transformation of IT and the company as a whole, or maintaining legacy systems while the CMO or CDO focus on innovation. With Gartner predicting that half of CIOs who have not transformed their team's capabilities by 2020 will be displaced from digital leadership teams, leaders will have to act now or risk being left in the dust.
This year’s report also dispelled the perception that DevOps is better suited for private companies than not-for-profit or public organisations. In fact, not-for-profit and government organisations voiced as much eagerness in improving as private enterprises, though they differ in how they measure success.
While for-profit companies rely on financial metrics to show improvement, public organisations may be more interested in delivering applications that are more secure and meet regulatory requirements, as well as a better experience to stakeholders. Since DevOps practises are about optimising organisation-wide to deliver better software faster, it helps both public and private organisations that rely on technology to support their users.
Final thoughts
The results of the latest State of DevOps Report should not come as much of a surprise to people in DevOps. The survey results clearly show that development teams that have successfully adopted DevOps have greater operational efficiency and are able to deliver a better customer experience.
As business environments continue to move towards a digital-first approach, DevOps adoption will increase year on year. Gartner research confirms this statistic, stating that DevOps will spread among traditional enterprises that struggle to manage business demands, seize new opportunities, and support rapid change resulting from digital business and bimodal strategies. Organisations that don’t embrace better practices to delivery higher quality software faster are at risk of being overtaken by their competitors and abandoned by their stakeholders.
Adopting DevOps is not easy, but that’s an area where Planit can help. Our DevOps practice, built on decades of successful optimisation programs, provides organisations with assured outcomes from capability assessments to enterprise-wide implementations.
To find out how DevOps can benefit you, visit our DevOps Optimisation & Services page.