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Category: Enterprise DevOps

  • 6 Traits That Define DevSecOps

    6 Traits That Define DevSecOps

    How do we define DevSecOps? A combination of DevOps and security is readily apparent, but the philosophy goes much deeper. In a recent eBook, The State of DevSecOps, we asked industry experts to define what DevSecOps meant to them. Below, we’ve condensed their answers into five core attributes.

    Following these principles, CIOs or CTOs now have a DevSecOps doctrine applicable to nearly any software development and release environment.

    Security Automation

    DevSecOps emphasizes security objectives within the automation processes. Ben Newton, director of product marketing and evangelism at Sumo Logic, defines DevSecOps as first making security requirements and objectives a clear part of the continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) cycle.

    Culture of Security

    DevSecOps establishes a team culture that embraces security concerns. As stated by Ben, a security team must provide “clear guardrails for developers as to what is fair game and what is not appropriate from a security perspective.” Building security expertise to integrate security into the entire DevOps lifecycle is critical.

    De-Siloing IT

    DevSecOps is about eroding boundaries. Just as DevOps has eroded the traditional separation between software engineering and IT operations teams, “DevSecOps further erases the walls between the DevOps team and IT Security,” said Tim Jarrett, senior director of product management at Veracode. “DevSecOps is about building a bridge between the security and DevOps teams,” echoed Dan Hubbard, chief product officer at Lacework.

    Security Shifts Left

    DevSecOps places security earlier on in the development process. IT security is traditionally viewed from a risk avoidance and compliance standpoint. Rather than viewing security as a gate, Tim noted that within DevSecOps, “security is better positioned to integrate earlier in the development cycle where they can actually make a difference.”

    Security Enables, Not Stalls

    DevSecOps supports, not stalls, agile development. DevSecOps doesn’t have to be sluggish. As Dan described, DevSecOps must “support the need for DevOps to move fast, but in a way where security is not ignored.” By embracing a security-as-code mindset and involving practices such as automated threat detection, agility is not sacrificed.

    — Bill Doerrfeld

  • Data Mapping and GDPR: How Are They Related?

    Data Mapping and GDPR: How Are They Related?

    Every business enterprise receives data from an array of diverse data points. The volume of data is growing, and businesses understand the importance of leveraging data and converting them into actionable insights. Owing to data diversity, it becomes important to integrate them in a standard format. This is where data mapping takes a precedence. It helps establish relationships between different data models. Although data mapping offers several business benefits, it is also an integral aspect of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance. This post discusses the concept of data mapping and how it helps you adhere to GDPR.

    What is Data Mapping?

    As the name suggests, data mapping is a term for mapping the journey of data in an organization. A data map answers questions ranging from the origin of data to its journey through the organization. Today, most business enterprises are using various types of data mapping software, including ETL data mapping tools, to achieve their data mapping targets. Depending on the capabilities of these software applications, data mapping is used to perform a wide range of data management tasks such as data integration, data migration, data warehousing and data transformation.

    How Does a Typical Data Map Look Like?

    Typically, a data map includes the following information:

    • Type of data collected
    • Basis of data processing (personal or sensitive)
    • Purpose of data collection
    • Storage period of data
    • Place of storage
    • Conditions of data storage
    • Various data transfer destinations
    • Location of third party vendors (especially, international third party vendors)
    • Protocols followed during the data transfer (to international third party vendors)
    • Legal basis for data processing

    GDPR Compliance and Data Mapping

    The GDPR mandates business enterprises to ensure fair handling and security of the information they own. To assure the security, it is important to track the data journey from its point of origin to a conclusion. Without a detailed insight into data lifecycle, it is difficult to implement any security. Thus, data mapping becomes an essential step to achieve GDPR compliance. The following GDPR articles and their requirements will help you understand the importance of data mapping.

    • Article 30: Maintaining a written record of data processing activities in an organization is mandatory. A data map serves as a best written record, which organizations can easily retrieve and present at the time of GDPR audit.
    • Article 25: Data mapping helps organizations showcase their commitment towards data privacy.
    • Article 6: This article governs personal data processing under a lawful basis. Data mapping helps organizations to show the basis of processing–personal or sensitive.
    • Article 28: Data maps enable GDPR auditors to understand the extent of third party access to organizational data. All organizations are required to maintain a list of third-parties with whom they might be sharing their business data for various reasons.
    • Article 35: This article discusses Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA), and data maps enable business enterprises to meet this requirement effectively. To analyze the risk of a particular process, an organization needs to understand the data flow across an organization–how the data is being collected, where it is stored, who uses the information, how long it will be retained and so on.

    How an Efficient Data Mapping Software Helps in Achieving GDPR Compliance

    Now, what is an efficient data mapping software? It can be any application that aids a business organization to exploit the benefits of data mapping while adhering to the GDPR regulations. The following are a few important features of such GDPR compliant data mapping tools, which helps distinguish them from others.

    • Ability to Identify and Map Personal Data: Advanced data mapping software applications, which may or may not involve ETL data mapping software, allows users to identify and map personal data flow in an organization. They are designed to handle a large influx of data. These solutions utilize metadata to identify various data elements. The metadata helps in creating data maps that answer questions ranging from the origin of data, type of data collected, data subjects involved in process, service level agreements, among others. Thus, advanced data mapping software applications enable users to maintain, manage and monitor data maps for business efficiency and GDPR compliance.
    • Helps Ensure Data Security: Professional-grade data mapping software solutions are equipped with various security features that enable users to secure their database while providing them access to data, whenever required. They also allow organizations to conduct risk analysis of their data and ensure adherence to DPIA.
    • Assures a Better Control: Earlier reference to GDPR articles suggest how GDPR mandates enterprises to ensure data protection while handling personal data. An efficient data mapping software will help them address this need. They enable users to modify their applications to establish control, as well as safeguard personal data effectively.

    Achieving GDPR compliance is not an easy task. However, you can easily address it at various stages and it will help your business adhere to privacy standards while effectively meeting customer demands. You can take advantage of various data mapping software applications including advanced ETL data mapping tools to create effective data maps, stay compliant and, above all, drive your business forward.

    — Chandra Shekhar

  • Collaboration Inside and Out for Innovation

    Collaboration Inside and Out for Innovation

    Across all industries today, organizations increasingly are migrating their infrastructures to the cloud in a bid to boost agility, lower the cost of IT ownership and reduce the risk of outages.

    Firms are under more pressure than ever before to innovate new products to keep up with newer, more agile firms. But before they can reap the benefits that come with going totally serverless, organizations must deal with the immediate challenge of meeting the ever-growing expectations of today’s digital-first customer.

    For newer firms, this is arguably a much easier undertaking, as their IT infrastructures will have been built using modern programming languages, technologies and software development practices. They also will most likely have adopted an agile approach and be highly adaptable to changing business needs. Conversely, older firms typically have a large body of IT that lives in an entirely different world. With infrastructures made up of a patchwork of interdependent legacy applications, built on top of monolithic architectures, these firms struggle to innovate customer-facing applications at pace. But if they are to compete, established players must adopt a similar approach to their more agile counterparts.

    Don’t Hate the Players

    It is completely natural for technology to evolve. The problem faced by many organizations that were pioneering in their use of technology is that they have now become victims of their own success. Take the world of financial services as an example. Banks that began building out their IT infrastructure decades ago have had to adapt gradually to new technologies. But it’s only in recent years that digital transformation has become a key business objective. In the not-so-distant past, banks may have been able to get away with taking their customers for granted, as the competitive landscape lacked any real diversity. But today competition abounds, with challenger banks and fintechs bringing innovative new products and services to markets traditionally owned by the banks.

    If the banks are to compete, they must seek to collaborate with the fintechs. Cloud-based open platforms that focus on open APIs are the most effective means of achieving this. By providing fintech partners with access to core systems via open APIs, the banks get to concentrate on their core operations while innovation from the outside helps them to deliver new applications to their customers.

    Historically, the banks would have been fiercely protective of their IP and core systems, but in collaborative environments, it is exactly this IP that can be used to create value in a safe and secure way. This is why banks increasingly are seeing fintechs as partners rather than poachers, as they are above all technology providers that are eager to have their services leveraged by large financial institutions. Similarly, banks understand that they must become more agile and entrepreneurial to deliver what their customers want. So, working with third parties that embody these characteristics is the most effective means of doing so.

    Embrace Internal Collaboration

    As well as overcoming legacy systems, legacy culture must also be addressed if true digital transformation is to be achieved. The first way to do this is to align application development with business goals, showing how a focus on the former helps to achieve the latter. Here, the adoption of a DevOps mindset can bring about the right culture for increasing innovation within. Though not entirely applicable to legacy systems, which must be evolved at a much more gradual pace using a waterfall approach, DevOps can be applied when it comes to systems of differentiation—which include decision-making, pricing, analytics and risk management tools in the middle office, as these tools will need updating more often to accommodate changing business practices or customer requirements.

    Creating cross-functional teams that include business analysts, developers, data scientists, QA, UAT and compliance experts means there is collective focus and responsibility for the delivery of applications. It also enables more agile development so that applications can be pushed through to the production environment continuously, rather than simply throwing a finished product over a wall with little care as to how it performs.

    In recent years, IT increasingly has been seen as a business driver. As software development methodologies and practices that rely on a collaborative culture continue to mature and further prove their value, partnerships between larger organizations and disruptors will be viewed in much the same way.

    — Mitesh Soni

  • The Bumpy Rise of the Tech-Savvy CFO in Healthcare Organizations

    The Bumpy Rise of the Tech-Savvy CFO in Healthcare Organizations

    The good news? The working relationship between technology leadership and financial officers in health systems organizations is improving. The bad news? Chasms between finance and IT remain, and they are common throughout health systems providers.

    Market Research firm Black Book Research recently found, in its “2019 Black Book CFO & Financial Leadership Survey,” that chief financial officers (CFOs) are no longer prioritizing cost-cutting and are becoming more aggressive in their technology spending. Interestingly, 52% of CFOs reported that they are shifting their priorities to financial technology investments, such as the implementation of advanced analytics, as well as 44% who cited increased spending on broader distributed ledger technologies.

    This is a dramatic change over previous years, where financial technology in many healthcare organizations witnessed negligence and budget cuts. “Ninety-one percent of CFOs surveyed agreed that their past organizational CIO and senior IT management did not support a culture where financial technology upgrades and acquisitions were prioritized as initiatives that impacted enterprise health system strategy,” the report found.

    The survey found that 90% of financial leaders and management strongly agreed that CIOs and IT management undervalued the needs of financial digital transformation and their financial tools. Technology leaders instead prioritized and convinced their boards that their electronic health record vendor-related offerings were the best investment going forward.

    The result? When it comes to finance technology in healthcare organizations, the world has become quite bifurcated. Consider this: Ninety-four percent of marginally performing hospital CFOs nationally claimed that they are not prepared to handle new healthcare delivery and payment models with their current financial software. Comparatively, 89% of the top financially performing hospitals in the country report having the organizational technology tools to address modified payment strategies.

    There’s also no rest for the weary financial officer, the survey found. While senior financial officers struggled with the pressures of smaller operating incomes, rising labor and supply costs, shrinking volumes, reduced reimbursements, declining patient volumes and changing healthcare delivery models, 83% report that in the past fiscal year that they received add-on responsibilities that included organizational productivity, strategic technology and innovation growth initiatives.

    “In a noticeable shift since the acquisition of enterprisewide EHR systems led by CIOs, CFOs have become the executive charged with digital transformations to improve competitive advantages, strategic growth and innovation across all customer touch points, while measuring the technologies’ ROI,” said Doug Brown, president of Black Book.

    Indeed, there has been a huge shift in CFO involvement in recent years. In fact, 88% of CFOs report having increased involvement in their health system IT agenda since the implementation of their enterprise EHR, as compared to 14% in 2015.

    But this dramatic rise hasn’t been without friction:

    • 85% of all respondents stated that their current organizational structure prevents enhanced CIO-CFO collaboration. Eighty-nine percent of CEOs interviewed disagree with this statement.
    • 82% of CFOs stated that they have an insufficient understanding of IT issues as the barrier to them not being included in technology selections and approvals prior to 2014.
    • 84% of CIOs surveyed in Q4 2018 claimed the processes and tools in finance are incomparable to IT functions and remain a significant barrier to mutual understanding.
    • 90% of all respondents agree that the absence of key performance indicators that link IT agendas to financial performance greatly limits their success.
    • 98% of respondents strongly agree that it’s the healthcare CFO’s job to ensure their organization fully realize the benefits of technology investments, not the CIO’s job, in 2019.

    While the CFO’s role in technology has grown, largely due to the substantial impact of EHR adoption—and this has caused significant stress between the CFO and CIO in many health services organizations—the working relationship is showing signs of becoming stronger and more collaborative. The report found that the continuing lack in understanding on both parties to converge on strategies, investment mindsets, healthcare customer experience, business models and agendas continue to keep the barriers high for many.

    — George V. Hulme

  • Leading Business Transformation From the Top

    Leading Business Transformation From the Top

    From their inception, new agile digital disruptors have realized the importance of centering their business objectives around value and technology, making it vital for traditional incumbents to follow suit. If waterfall organizations ignore this challenge, their ability to innovate and react quickly to market changes and new customer demands is threatened. To change and succeed, the active involvement from the C-suite is essential to instill a cultural shift, placing value and people (employees and customers) at the center of any transformation.

    Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well, actually, it is.

    At the heart of any transformation, there are common themes among agile organizations that, if implemented correctly, can have a major impact on productivity, innovation and the ability to grow market share, while enhancing the customer experience.

    Be Value-Driven

    Being value- and purpose-driven should be at the center of any organization wanting to be more agile, with a strong focus on the customer. To serve the customer, your organization, team and individual purpose must be explicit and aligned to one another. This ensures that every team member is directing their energies for the same goal to unlock the full potential of the business.

    On the surface, you may think this is already happening. Some boards are setting objectives related to the customer or efficiency, but too often this message gets diluted due to an inconsistent approach to determining value and prioritization. Often, decisions are not based around customer value because customer thinking isn’t extended throughout the value chain. Frequently, when decisions are taken in isolation, work that could offer true customer value is missed altogether. For example, fixing certain tech debt is often prioritized without the consideration of customer value, which contributes to waste. Value may be lost due to legacy processes, such as planning, budgeting and forecasting, which can slow organizations down.

    A lack of feedback loops and continuous planning can also impact business velocity, with the board needing to listen to product teams, as they are closest to the customer. This ensures that any reprioritization by the board is based on value, which is then filtered down once again, giving the product teams confidence to make decisions that will positively impact the customer. Traceability is increased further by implementing a story hierarchy, allowing everything from initial concepts, features and detailed user stories with acceptance criteria in a structured, easy-to-follow way.

    Do

    1. Ask what the value of any initiative is, even at the feature level, making sure it aligns with the organization’s objectives.
    2. Create true transparency of organizational alignment via a consistent hierarchy of work.
    3. Understand and organize around your value, helping teams relate to the customer and your goals. Too often teams are functional or system-based and don’t appreciate the end user experience, making systems thinking harder to achieve.

    Don’t

    1. Prioritize based on effort, which is a typical waterfall anti-pattern. Small, easy, quick wins will only reduce the capability to deliver true value.
    2. Set up projects to deal with regulatory change. Consider these as any other non-functional requirements and add to the product teams’ backlog.
    3. Organize in functional silos with work having to be passed between them to be completed.

    Create Teams Around Products

    In the world of agile, teams siloed by function rather than products don’t work. They’re too removed from the customer, require process hand-offs and often have competing objectives, resulting in work not focused on value. Small product teams stay close to the customer and quickly adapt to sudden market changes and differing customer demands. When done well, these teams are consistently more productive, morale is higher and better-quality products are released to market faster, with a lower risk of failure than traditional methods.

    To do this, teams need to be carefully constructed with the right multiskilled people who complement the product, including non-IT roles, such as sales and marketing. They should ideally be no larger than 10 to 12 people or “two pizzas” (see Brooks’ Law), which makes them highly productive and accountable, empowered by clearer visibility and effective collaboration. Organizations with large monolithic systems will find this challenging due to the amount of responsibility placed on the team. Breaking these down into loosely coupled microservices can help by reducing the scope of accountability to a manageable size.

    By having teams work this way, products can have funding associated to them, with product teams directly mapping to this. This makes it easier to track ROI, which is a better metric to measure output compared to capex or opex. As a result, legacy reporting needs to change, too; the metrics you really need are cycle time, right first time (quality) and customer experience. These are then used by product teams to understand how they are contributing value. All these metrics can be generated automatically and made available through dashboards; gone are the days when PMs and PMOs need to chase developers for updates.

    Do

    1. Value teams and individuals in value creation roles and remunerate them accordingly, considering product ROI. In particular, rockstar engineers should be able to increase ROI, and should be retained at all costs.
    2. Break monoliths down into microservices. These are smaller in scope and more manageable for a single team.

    Don’t

    1. Set up project teams, which by nature are short-lived and reduce accountability. Empirical data shows that stable teams are 60% more productive and 60% more responsive to customer input than teams that rotate members.
    2. Track value through project accounting metrics–opex/capex split doesn’t help make decisions, it only creates management overheads that demotivate people.

    Create an Engaging Working Environment

    Globally, two-thirds of employees are not engaged. This means employees turn up for work but do not apply themselves and offer minimal effort. By having an agile mindset, implementing a set of principles based around value that everyone works to, gives employees the confidence when making decisions. Even if the outcome isn’t exactly what was expected, having a fail-fast attitude can allow continuous learning and improvement to flourish—the only way to evolve is to fail. It also helps create a culture where engaged employees feel valued and psychologically safe.

    With an engaged workforce, people collaborate more, helping knowledge and skills to be shared, boosting innovation. This notion is supported by the Medici Effect, where the greatest innovations are created by the “intersection of ideas, concepts and cultures …” This environment doesn’t just have an impact on innovation: According to Gallup Business Journal, engaged employees can be directly related to increased revenue. That isn’t all: Compared with disengaged teams, engaged teams show:

    • 24% to 59% less employee turnover.
    • 10% higher customer ratings.
    • 21% greater profitability.
    • 17% higher productivity.
    • 28% less shrinkage.
    • 70% fewer safety incidents.
    • 41% less absenteeism.

    Leaders should make space and time for diverse new ideas to emerge but must maintain an overall sense of purpose. It is their responsibility to help people resist the urge to converge quickly on a solution without feeling they lack direction.

    Do

    1. Empower your people by trusting them to do their jobs, which in turn will create value for the customer. As Richard Branson said, “I have always believed that the way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers.”
    2. Embrace failure and learn from it. The fastest way to innovation is through experimentation and learning. Delivering in smaller increments reduces the risk and investment and gives results quicker.

    Don’t

    1. Assume you have all the answers. Allow your employees to develop a collaboration of ideas to identify one possible solution to a product or process design challenge and find seven possibilities.
    2. Expect innovation to happen in a vacuum. It’s not the responsibility of a few individuals but rather one big team. Value new ideas from your employees and create an environment where innovation can flourish and is rewarded.

    Outside-In Focus

    Although trust in your employees and understanding their motivations promote increased productivity, if organizations ignore their customer pain points and don’t have the ability to adequately respond to customer feedback, all other efforts will be in vain. Leaders need to consider what is happening outside the organization and be aware of customer demands, as well as market trends and behaviors.

    In one of the most recognized cases, Blockbuster’s demise, many consider digital disruption paved the way to administration. In reality, it may well have been the company’s difficulty to innovate quickly enough compared to more nimble competitors. Blockbuster was savvy enough to see the rise of Netflix as a threat, but internal legacy processes made it more difficult to react. When it did act, its traditional way of working led to a proposed solution costing circa $400 million, which led to investors struggling to see ROI, so deemed it too risky.

    A more agile organization could have responded quicker and with smaller increments (MVP), making its overall solution cheaper. Further analysis would have also identified that the cost of technology advancement would decrease and support services would evolve. Being set up as an agile organization and assessing outside influences, Netflix had also foreseen the move from the traditional VHS-versus-DVD market to what customers really wanted: video on demand.

    This is no longer a choice; all leaders must be aware of outside influences (PESTEL) and emphasize the use of consumer analysis and encourage their employees to put themselves into the end user’s situation. By doing this, agile organizations can adapt to market forces and customer feedback quickly, helping to prioritize the backlog and provide value.

    Do

    1. Take feedback from the customer early, feature toggling and canary testing are great ways of enabling this.
    2. Constantly research, analyze and understand the effects outside influences can have with business and customer alignment, and the impact on value.
    3. Respect your competitors and the new kids on the block. They may have seen something you don’t.
    4. Understand how technology can and will change consumer expectations and habits. Evolve your products accordingly.

    Don’t

    1. Rely on past successes to survive. Phrases such as, “We’ve always done it this way,” and, “We’re too big to fail” should never be spoken.
    2. Dismiss information (shoot the messenger) because it’s a tough pill to swallow and will require significant change within your organization.

    If the above organizational attributes are not realized, the chances are that your business is not agile, so a shift in mindset is necessary to establish a new way of working. This will only happen if the CEO leads from the front, embraces agile personally and creates an engaging working environment where work is prioritized by value and people (employees and customers). Then, and only then, can innovation thrive, boosting productivity and helping your business to react fast enough to changing market forces and remain competitive.

    — Louise Cermak

  • How Systemic Approaches to ITOps Impact the Business Culture

    How Systemic Approaches to ITOps Impact the Business Culture

    We are at an inflection point in the rise of big data. Enterprise IT infrastructure is producing data at a scale like the world has never seen before. IT operations (ITOps) management has accelerated past the notion of data storage and processing (vis a vis the Hadoop model) and into the world of analytics-as-a-service. We now need systems to drive insights and manage change on-demand. In fact, we need a new operating model for IT in the face of these new effects.

    Can a New System Save Us?

    The key to transforming into a responsive, data-driven enterprise—while avoiding a flood of unnecessary processes and over-staffing—is to adapt automation to intelligently consolidate information flows. At the same time, the dynamic nature of today’s IT environment requires IT teams to become literate in a completely new approach to technology, one that spans all functions of the business. Consequently, risks that previously stayed inside organizational units now leak across domains, influencing decision-making for the entire company. These factors will try to pull the organization in multiple directions at once; only a unified data management system with the intelligence to extract operational insights can drive positive business change.

    Culture Has Got to Change, Too

    Agile processes such as DevOps and AIOps offer mechanisms to control the flow of data and turn it into actionable results. For example, continuous application development and deployment gathers data about functional use, user sentiment, efficiency and various other metrics to inform the overall process and improve the product. Such rapid dev cycles let organizations identify and fix issues more quickly and with fewer resources, ultimately delivering greater business value.

    The resulting streamlined collaboration among IT, development and customer teams improves capabilities but also introduces dependencies that must be managed effectively. It changes the culture to adapt to the system, and thereby, the system of service delivery will fundamentally affect how organizations are structured, built and run. Eventually, there will be increased digitization of every human process, and that means human impact slowly will be replaced by AI impact. This doesn’t mean that machines are coming to take our jobs; instead, it means the modern enterprise IT organization must address a new future. How will it look?

    Retraining and Reskilling Is a Fact of Life: In a world of dynamic IT, requirements are no longer static, and teams need to be prepared. Organizational units must be able to work in different ways with new technology, with new skills that include robotic emotional intelligence, cloud-native literacy and infinite adaptability.

    System operators become stewards of the business because system operations directly impact business outcomes. It won’t be enough for workers to merely deploy, configure and manage IT while isolated from the goals of the company, because those goals are inextricably linked to how objectives are achieved through innovation. Employees will need to develop new skills for functioning in a dynamic system. Training staff in agile methodologies, service-oriented software design and six sigma-style approaches for process improvement will become critical for success.

    Automation Is Everything: Automation by policy won’t be enough; even runbooks will become obsolete. Data and results are always changing, so simple automation will not drive meaningful change. AI can be used to drive automation policies and frameworks, with the potential to reduce errors and integrate disparate systems, which previously required multiple points of oversight.

    The trend toward using AI for data understanding is driving intelligent services into other parts of the business, as well. Rather than just for correlating system and operational data, AI is being adapted to business process optimization. Moving forward, IT operations can begin to run themselves, led by deep data analytics. Alerting and response processes automatically will use their own feedback to update the system’s intelligence, identify emergent trends and take actions to deliver improved operational results.

    Risk Becomes Universal: Increasing connectivity and generalized frameworks (such as DevOps and site reliability engineering) mean that risk is no longer siloed to one department or function. It’s spread everywhere, and cascading effects become commonplace.

    In general, successful engineering outcomes rely on coordinated processes and policies that dictate operational needs, even after deployment. Introducing connectivity between formerly disparate systems can create instability that potentially affects operations in other unintended areas. Thus, broad risks arise if different systems can’t interoperate once unified into a single IT ecosystem. Addressing requirements under a generalized framework helps prevent gaps between application implementations.

    The System Drags the Company Forward: Insights-driven action will transform digital business well in advance of executive priorities. Change will happen before anyone is ready. Indeed, with so much complexity, so many tools and processes and so many competing business demands, IT changes now impact culture in entirely new ways.

    Business impacts will come from system intelligence rather than manual processes. Efficiency in operations management is derived from the entire system, including the people themselves. What was previously the IT culture is rapidly being replaced with a combination of self-adapting processes and workers who focus more on value than on plumbing.

    Transforming the enterprise from silos into integrated platforms will propel the business forward. The resulting system will also drive cultural change at an accelerated rate, perhaps faster than the worker community is prepared to accept, but informed by real data instead of executive intuition.

    — Bhanu Singh

  • 27-Factor Assessments Lead to Success With DevOps

    27-Factor Assessments Lead to Success With DevOps

    October 2019 will mark the 10th anniversary of the first DevOpsDays, where the term “DevOps” began to catch on. In the world of information technology, 10 years is a long time and it is quite evident based on the amount of change that has transpired since then. To name a few, we have seen the maturing of CI/CD automation and many innovations such as application release automation, containers, cloud infrastructure orchestration, DevSecOps, DevOps database, DevOps governance and micro-services.

    These innovations have become part of “mainstream DevOps.” This evolution is continuing with AIOps, machine learning, value stream management and others. Each of these innovations has made DevOps not only more powerful but also more complex.

    As a consultant working on DevOps projects through their life cycle, I have learned that complexity can plague the success of DevOps within an organization. Complexity cannot be avoided, as DevOps is complex and will likely continue to be. However, the key to avoiding failure through your DevOps journey is to engage the complexity by using DevOps tenets to implement DevOps. Do not try to boil the ocean. Instead, at each leg in the journey, take inventory of where you are in terms of current goals, state and best practices. Fine-tune your direction and build your solution using proven continuous delivery methods.

    The 27-Factor Assessment Model

    A comprehensive yet efficient assessment of your current state is key for ensuring complexity has not gotten out of hand and the organization is focused on success criteria that meet the needs of the business.

    I use a 27-factor assessment model. The factors are the cross-product of current best practices for three dimensions (people, process and technology) with nine pillars.

    A Scope of the 9 Pillars

    Leadership: Gain insight and understanding of your leadership practices and how leadership can improve DevOps adoption and performance.

    Culture: Identify opportunities to improve cross-functional collaboration and communication across your organization.

    Application Development (or Design for DevOps): A practical analysis of application development practices identifies improvements for your DevOps performance.

    Continuous Integration: Analysis of branching and software integration workflows and tools identifies bottlenecks and improvements for builds and packaging processes.

    Continuous Testing: Analysis of end-to-end software testing, verification workflows and tools identifies bottlenecks and improvements for accelerating testing while improving the coverage and quality of tests.

    Infrastructure on Demand (or Elastic Infrastructure): Analysis of systems and services for orchestrating and hosting applications and DevOps workloads provides insights to improve performance and utilization of resources.

    Continuous Monitoring: Analysis of end-to-end monitoring workflows and tools for applications, releases metrics and infrastructure provides improved visibility for all business and technical stakeholders.

    Continuous Security: Analysis of security practices and tools identifies opportunities to integrate security practices into the continuous delivery pipeline.

    Continuous Delivery/Deployment: Analysis of delivery and deployment practices identifies improvements for safer, faster and more efficient releases.

    Each combination of pillar and dimension has associated best practices used to score relevance and current state relative a DevOps goal agreed by the organization. Here is an example of the continuous security pillar.

    The 27-factor assessment for an application is an important input to a future state value-stream map workshop. The value-stream map is then transformed into a road map and implementation plan.

    This assessment approach is thorough and yields results that are usually accepted by stakeholders because they are involved in the process at each step. The result is aligned to their priorities and goals and the solution road map is directly traceable to stakeholder inputs. The approach is flexible enough to evolve over time and can be customized to suit the priorities of an organization. For those that argue that 27 factors are too many and too complex, I must say the complexity of DevOps itself requires a comprehensive assessment approach.

    Conclusion

    In this article, I described a comprehensive, efficient and evolvable assessment approach that uses 27 critical success factors for assessing DevOps applications. While DevOps offers immense value for software development, delivery and deployment, a rigorous and thorough assessment with up-to-date best practices are essential to accomplish DevOps goals. Each organization is different and has different DevOps goals and requirements. The changes to the three dimensions vary according to the results of each DevOps assessment.

    — Marc Hornbeek

  • IT Skills Challenge: Let’s Talk About the Elephant in the Hiring Room

    IT Skills Challenge: Let’s Talk About the Elephant in the Hiring Room

    There is a glaring skills challenge facing the UK tech industry. It is the perennial concern of business leaders, with the most recent research from the Cloud Industry Forum stating that 52% of UK tech companies lack IT skills in at least one area of their business. The findings, based on interviews with senior IT business decision-makers, also predicted that the skills challenge is only going to increase in the future.

    It is an obvious statement that these shortages stem from not having enough skilled people in the workforce. However, it is more complicated than this, and many in our industry compound the problem with poor awareness of diversity and inclusion.

    Look at the tech industry workforce: It is overwhelmingly white and male and there is often an office culture that reinforces the prominence of this demographic in the workforce. If you have a skills shortage, it makes no sense to culturally exclude half the population. Every business needs to cast its net as wide as possible. Not only does this increase the skills gene pool, but it also has been shown that the more diverse arrangement of people there is in an organization, the more successful they will be in meeting the needs of their customers.

    No hiring policy should limit a skilled employee from making a difference just because of the color of their skin, gender or belief.

    Unintended biases can take hold in organizations. For example, it is often seen that tech businesses fall into the trap of reinforcing bias by appointing hiring managers from similar backgrounds and experiences, a process known as affinity bias. Most organizations, especially large ones, claim to be diverse and inclusive, but a simple glance at their board members can tell you how much of that is true. All this bias ultimately leads to the same result: hiring people for a less diverse and less effective workforce where most employees look, sound and think the same. What employees don’t realize is that a diverse workforce is ultimately more profitable and productive.

    To ensure that your company is hiring a diverse workforce, HR decision-makers can opt for process changes that not only assist in screening applicants but also checks for inherent biases. Blind hiring also could be used, as it works by removing personal information (such as name, age or gender) from a resumé or CV during the assessment and selection process.

    Lack of gender diversity is a problem area for tech companies across the globe. While it is a known fact that women are at par with men when it comes to skill sets, they are still less represented at managerial and boardroom positions. The situation is even worse for women of color.

    Gender-diverse teams are on average more creative, innovative and, therefore, more profitable, and this should be an incentive enough for tech companies to hire and retain more women who can grow and take leadership opportunities. Another way you can address gender diversity in the workplace is by ensuring female representation on interview panels, adequate maternity schemes and an overall environment where everyone feels accepted and invited.

    Another issue one may not consider is the use of certain language that can offend and even discourage women or members from LGBTQ backgrounds from applying for a role. For example, using words such as “aggressive,” “challenging” and “ambitious” in job descriptions have been shown to suggest more traditionally masculine cultures that discourage female and minority groups from applying.

    Working in the IT industry myself, I understand the struggles and challenges of recruiting a skilled workforce, especially women. Having said that, I also understand that a diverse workforce is always good news, not just for the morale of the employees, but also for the overall office productivity. We must take proactive steps to close the skills gap in our industry because if this decline continues, it can have far-reaching consequences.

    Understanding the gravity of the situation, it’s time we moved beyond half measures and took concrete steps in recruitment and retention in our IT workforce. Britain has long been a melting pot of cultures and to take advantage of this, IT organizations must curb implicit biases in hiring. All employees from all backgrounds should feel invited and respected for their skills and talent. Because as an industry, it’s all about embracing new ways of thinking, organizing and problem-solving.

    — Annalisa O’Rourke

  • Developers Have More in Common With Marketers Than They Think

    Developers Have More in Common With Marketers Than They Think

    Marketing professionals and developers together are critical in advancing customer experience

    More than a decade ago, in the early age of digital transformation, industry analysts and insiders began discussing the need for an increased focus on the collaboration between CTOs, CIOs and CMOs to achieve business goals. It was determined that CMOs would spend more on technology than their technical c-suite counterparts, thus creating an increased need for cross-functional alignment and cooperation.

    Today, we find the same kind of alignment is still required, but on an even deeper technical level—between developers and marketers. They are charged with the day-to-day operations of highly scaled and complex marketing operations driven by increasingly complex martech stacks. Companies across industries and markets are becoming more digitally oriented, so the need for seamless collaboration between business functions is mission-critical.

    There are many reasons for the perception that marketers and developers share completely different business priorities—from the trope of left brain versus right brain to completely different modes of operation, it has been assumed that marketers are practitioners of soft science and developers are entrenched in code. However, when you consider the nature of today’s modern marketing technology, you realize that both skill sets and sets of expertise are crucial to engaging, retaining and growing a company’s customer base.

    To marketers, developers can come across as unapproachable or highly focused internally on technical tasks that distance them from customers. To developers, marketers may seem less technically savvy and unsympathetic to the time requirements in technical projects and the juggling act and trade-offs that ensue for competing priorities. The result is an environment and dynamic in which one party often can feel the other has more control and say over the other. However, what we’re learning is that most of these sentiments are exaggerated or are changing as the business landscape continues to evolve. The truth is, marketers and developers have a lot more in common than they think.

    A recent survey of 500 marketers and developers at companies of all sizes uncovered the real truth behind this relationship and understand its inner workings. We looked at identifying their priorities, challenges and where they see success when it comes to their working relationship. Two things in particular stood out:

    1. Business alignment is overwhelmingly the key objective that both parties agree they need to effectively achieve to succeed.
    2. Customer experience is by far the highest priority where the two overlap.

    Broken down, 79% of marketers and 83% of developers agree that being aligned on business goals and priorities is a huge factor in being able to succeed in their roles. Developers cultivate this partnership in large part by recognizing that the work of marketers is becoming more data-driven and technical—a fact that 73% of marketers report being true.

    Meanwhile, customer success serves as the factor bringing marketing and DevOps closer together. Customer experience represents a critical driver to the success of any business, and on that, both marketers and developers passionately agree. Somewhat surprising, more developers (89%) than marketers (86%) agree with the notion that every touchpoint and interaction with a customer resolutely matters.

    The area where marketers and developers face their greatest disconnect is time. Forty-three percent of marketers feel they cannot get requests done promptly, while an overwhelming majority of developers (86%) are confident in their ability to deliver work within a requested time frame. When it comes to the development of new products or software, this is the biggest pain point for both, leaving each side equally frustrated when trying to appease the demands of the other. But with strategic marketing efforts, better collaboration and a more innate understanding of each others’ roles, marketers and developers can drive powerful business results.

    Here are just a few simple tips that can foster a more harmonious relationship between marketers and developers that results in real business value:

    • Marketers should involve developers in software evaluations as early as possible.
    • Developers should communicate the work required to accomplish a given request and any trade-offs that need to be made to curb marketers’ expectations.
    • Both parties should reconnect outside of specific projects to frequently share context about their goals, challenges and opportunities.

    That last tip is key, as the survey results show marketers and developers are more aligned on those factors than they realize. As the role of marketers continues to evolve in digital organizations and developers take note of this shifting tide, the two have the potential to wade each other through this massive wave of digital disruption. All it takes is walking a mile in each others’ shoes and realizing that both pairs fit.

    — Len Shneyder

  • The Value of Visual Data in Decision-Making

    The Value of Visual Data in Decision-Making

    Gone are the days when a gut-feeling was a major decision-making driver in business. Instinct has ruled business leaders’ mind for a very long time, but as companies expand their business globally, instinct should give way to data as the best measure to remain competitive.

    We live in a data-driven world. Today, number-crunching algorithms decide who we should hire, where we should invest and even who we should date. In fact, data-driven organizations that harness insights to create a competitive advantage are growing rapidly—at an average of 30% annually. What’s more, data-driven organizations are on a track to earn $1.8 trillion by 2021.

    Data in Businesses

    Technology is tucked inside every nook and corner of modern business. Smart leaders use data generated to understand what’s happening in the organization, and this analysis helps them bring agility to their business.

    Top companies around the world use data to add value to their business. They gain a strategic advantage over their competitors putting data—not instincts—to good use.

    Being data-driven offers multiple advantages:

    • Data is the new gold. A long-term relationship with data helps organizations set trends.
    • Data-driven decisions offer a better customer experience. Data reveals customer patterns and their journey with products.
    • Data-driven organizations respond better to market demands with innovative solutions.
    • Data-driven decisions hone key business areas such as finance and operations.

    Data offers insights and executives turn those insights into key decisions. But you cannot ignore that fact that data is complex, let alone its analysis. We’re all familiar with excel sheets full of thousands of rows and hundreds of columns of numbers. So, how can this turn into insights? That’s where data visualizations come into action.

    Data Visualizations Make Hidden Insights Obvious

    Interpreting a voluminous dataset for actionable insights is tough. Data visualizations make voluminous data accessible and comprehensive. How?

    Data viz, as it is often called, is the transformation of any unstructured data into visuals. Visuals add a component to human understanding.

    For example, the World Bank releases its doing business project data every year, providing insights about countries with conditions for establishing businesses. It was launched in 2002 to measure the regulations applied to various small and medium-size organizations.

    A total of 190 economies were surveyed on 12 topics including employing workers, tax benefits and resolving insolvency. A visual summary of data on doing business in 2018 was produced to make these crucial insights digestible for businesses, which then could put them to use.

    The data science company that created the visualization took the data and plotted it on a world map. It added shades from red to green to indicate the least and the most favored economies for doing business. The data is made easy, appealing and comprehensive. Any business manager or executive can easily identify emerging economies for investment.

    Using visual data, insights such as the best and worst country for doing business and economy rankings are now obvious. Furthermore, companies can turn these insights into key decisions regarding expanding business across boundaries.

    Take a look at the example above: The United States is an economically powerful country; however, data tells that New Zealand tops the list of economies with ease of doing business in 2018 with 86.55 DTF*. Many countries, including Singapore, Demark, Korean Republic and Hong Kong, also rank favorably in the index.

    Three major reasons that data visualization can be crucial for any data-driven organizations are:

    1. Data visualizations amplify a story with pictures and visuals. Its impact on the audience is more powerful than bland numbers and text. Moreover, human minds are hardwired to remember visuals. Data visualizations tap into pictorial strengths to drive executive decision-making.
    2. Data visualizations make difficult data comprehensible. Business executives and key decision-makers are not masters in every field. They need comparative measures to drive their decisions. Data visualizations provide just that.
    3. Data visualizations help in decision analysis. It offers a platform to interact with the facts. Jeff Bezos said that not all the decisions are made by factual analysis. But whichever decisions can be made on facts, should be.

    Conclusion

    Data should be an influence to any major business decision. And so, data visualization is a powerful tool to bring dramatic changes to organizations. It can provide answers to many key questions, and make the data visually appealing, easy to play with and interesting to explore. CEOs and managers should emphasize the importance of the democratization of their data to add value to their processes.

    *DTF: Distance to Frontier. It is a score between zero to one hundred, which illustrates the worst and best performance of an economy observed on each doing business parameter.

    — Naveen Gattu