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Tag: Mode 1

  • Phoenix Rising: The DevOps Keys to Business Rebirth

    Phoenix Rising: The DevOps Keys to Business Rebirth

    In “The Phoenix Project,” a 2013 novel about an IT manager rescuing a late, over-budget IT initiative, Gene Kim demonstrates how collaboration between IT operations, development and business users can impact the business. In the era of digital transformation, the need to bring development and operations together—in what is often called DevOps—is more important than ever, as IT is now more than an enabler of the business. IT is the business.

    What’s at stake today is more than just a project or someone’s position or even the viability of an in-house department versus outsourcing the function. Instead, it may be the very existence of the company. According to Gartner, 25 percent of companies will lose business due to digital incompetence by 2017 while IDC predicts that 75 percent of the S&P 500 will be replaced by 2027. To avoid the fate of becoming an industry has-been, today’s market leaders need to ensure they won’t be overtaken by more agile competitors that respond faster to a rapidly changing marketplace.

    Automate Everything

    Today’s businesses need to transform into digital enterprises to thrive in today’s digital economy, and this transformation needs to be far more profound than simply investing in the latest digital technology. Because the pace of the digital economy requires companies to roll out new services faster than ever before, businesses are challenged to move from idea to revenue as soon as possible. This need for speed leads to a desire—really a requirement—for agile applications.

    For many of today’s enterprises, this means they have to stop thinking that a successful future depends solely on a traditional strategy of product innovation, using data analytics to better understand and serve their customers or building a higher quality, more profitable product portfolio. Instead, like the mythical phoenix, their survival may well depend on a complete rebirth around making the practices of agile application delivery and DevOps a core competency.

    DevOps teams need the ability to efficiently develop, test and deploy new releases faster, with high quality and stability. Using automation technologies to design-in this speed, quality and scalability within the development life cycle is critical.  The continuous integration and delivery processes at the core of DevOps and agile practices are enabled by many new automation tools and capabilities. Each of these tools typically targets discrete elements or steps in the entire process and DevOps teams use them as such, finding the right tool for the job. In addition to faster and higher-quality development throughput, building automation into the code of the application ensures better application services delivery in the production environment.

    The good news is that 60 percent to 70 percent of these enterprise application services or jobs within most organizations are micro-batch, batch or event-driven—and can be managed with a comprehensive job scheduling solution. By automating jobs as part of the application code and subjecting the job artifact to all the other automation processes, companies can substantially reduce time and effort during and after the application delivery process.

    According to Enterprise Management Associates, companies with workload automation reduce application outage time by about 70 hours annually, raise service level agreement standards, free 41 percent more IT staff for strategic projects, and defer or eliminate an average of 50 percent of IT staffing requirements.

    Traditional vs. Innovative IT

    Too many companies intent on being agile and innovative believe that a successful DevOps organization must be free of the trappings of rigorous change management. Business innovation and increased employee productivity, however, can’t exist without a stable IT foundation. The goal is to have a balance of both strategies in an organization. Gartner refers to this as Bimodal IT, which has two modes: “Mode 1 is a traditional, plan-driven approach that emphasizes safety and accuracy in the pursuit of reliability. Mode 2 is iterative, being largely outcome-focused and emphasizing agility and ‘just enough’ with respect to areas such as planning and process.”

    By committing to balancing the two strategies, organizations can increase agility without sacrificing stability. More importantly, companies can increase employee satisfaction by different teams successfully doing the jobs they are paid to do, whether it’s to drive innovation or keep the lights on. It’s worth noting that Gartner believes many elements in DevOps apply to both modes and that by 2020, at least 80 percent of practices identified today with DevOps and Mode 2 will be adopted by traditional Mode 1 groups.

    While thinking of your company as a phoenix may be essential for survival, the benefits go way beyond that. Just like the revitalized bird, your company can once again be youthful and vibrant, capable of soaring to new heights. This is a strategic goal worth investing in.

    About the Author / Gur Steif

    gursteifGur Steif is the president of the Workload Automation product line for BMC Software. Under Steif’s leadership, the Workload Automation business has more than doubled in size. Previously, Steif was the general manager and vice president for both the Workload Automation product line and the Performance & Availability business line. During this time, he grew the Workload Automation business at triple the market growth rate while also delivering a double-digit increase in customer satisfaction for Performance & Availability. In his 25-year career in technology, Steif has held leadership roles in strategy, product management, R&D, sales, marketing and M&A in IT operations management, application management and workload automation. Connect with him on LinkedIn/Twitter.

     

  • IT Organization: Blend, Don’t Divide

    IT Organization: Blend, Don’t Divide

    Bi-modal is the new normal, but the best way to approach this is to blend operations, not create separate groups.

    There’s been much ado lately about the transition of enterprise IT from traditional, steady operations to a highly agile and services-based operation. Companies of all sizes are moving to the cloud and adopting DevOps, yet many must maintain legacy systems for years to come. Pundits and analysts such as Gartner suggest that CIOs need to split their organizations into two: the Mode 1 group (traditional, “lights on” operations) and Mode 2 (the business-innovating group). In fact, Gartner is so bullish on this idea that the research firm is predicting that 72 percent of enterprises will be operating in a bimodal structure by 2017.

    Yet dividing and conquering won’t work. By creating two separate groups, with likely two different leaders, there’s bound to be tension and turf wars. Overlap of duties will happen, and higher costs may result. Regardless, the two groups will still need to work together—but may have little incentive to do so.

    Let’s take a step back. Bimodal is just another name for transitions that IT organizations have been through many times in the past: analog vs. digital, mainframe vs. client/server, batch vs. interactive, native vs. web-based, on-premises vs. cloud and so on. Creating walls between existing and emerging processes and technologies doesn’t make much sense. It’s possible to manage “old” and the “new” requirements and projects in tangent.

    Instead of creating walls, Mode 1 and Mode 2 processes can coexist and employees with different perspectives can help each other as the company transitions to its next phase of innovation. Over time, the entire organization will shift to the most progressive, efficient and business-aligned way of delivering IT.

    IT organizations should think more holistically about building cross-functional teams made up of the best members to serve that team’s particular purpose. Those teams may have mobile app developers and DevOps managers sitting side by side with network engineers and system architects who have developed deep specialties in enterprise databases and data center infrastructure over many years. There may be Waterfall teams and DevOps teams, and individuals managing cloud providers working closely with data center managers implementing converged infrastructure. It all begins with the business requirements and designing a strategy that is inclusive of both required legacy systems and future, cloud-based initiatives.

    But wait, aren’t the most progressive companies Mode 2 from top to bottom? The answer is no. Companies such as Amazon, Google, Netflix, Facebook, Apple and LinkedIn are IT innovators that also manage solid and stable internal environments.

    It was only in mid-2015 that Apple announced its migration of the Siri application platform to the Apache Mesos platform. This didn’t happen overnight. The team responsible for Siri realized that it could cut costs and increase flexibility for ongoing support and development. It was an evolutionary move focused on front-end scalability and allowing a clustered approach for scale and management—arguably a very Mode 2 approach. That said, it’s also widely known that the data sources for Siri are a mix of traditional RDBMS and No-SQL—massive data repositories handling millions of transactions 24/7. These platforms require Mode 1, utility-grade availability constructs.

    LinkedIn is another innovator running a distributed architecture that blends Mode 1 technologies (data layer and business engines) with Mode 2 clusters focused on presentation of new and existing initiatives.

    Ways to Blend Effectively

    Here are some ways to approach a blended IT organization that incorporate both Mode 1 and 2 technologies and processes without building walls:

    1. Create a best-of-breed environment. Evaluate your applications and create an architecture plan. Identify existing applications that require modernization. Create a clear picture of the gap between current and desired state. Build an architecture for your applications that leverages one or more platforms that can adapt to your application architecture goals, both present and future.
    2. Balance out your weakness. Most large companies in traditional industries will be heavier on the Mode 1 orientation regarding skill sets, tools and processes. To jump-start a transition toward Mode 2 operations, consider hiring people from software startups with ample experience developing, scaling and maintaining cloud-based systems under rapid time frames. These are the people whose failures bring the perspective necessary to empathize with your Mode 1 teams. They might even appreciate the Mode 1 team’s experience.

      Conversely, if your organization is already a strong Mode 2 operation, know that scaling your business will require you to embrace Mode 1 skills to maintain reliability and consistent user experience as demand grows unpredictably. Ideally, find someone with a large enterprise background that has experience delivering reliability for new, web-scale applications.

    1. Don’t force new methods. DevOps, a technique for infrastructure management in support of rapid delivery of applications services that is generally considered to be well-suited for Mode 2 applications, may not retrofit to every situation. For example, one can write code to manage infrastructure systems that expand and contract with the proliferation of application containers. While well-suited for the container-based application model, many of the coding concepts associated can be too complex for scripting the deployment of a multi-tier Mode 1 application. The layers and complexities of the scripting don’t provide enough return on the time invested to justify the upfront efforts. Leveraging a purpose-built automation engine or simply deploying manually likely makes more sense today. Choose the technique that best serves the initiative, not the one that seems the newest and coolest.

    Rather than getting hung up on how to reorganize IT departments, a better use of time is to determine how to blend the best of the old and the new. IT organizations today are frequently in a state of transition, given the pace of new technological developments. By merging tried-and-true tools and practices that deliver stability with the latest innovations for web-scale business models, companies can move quickly in their respective markets without sacrificing business longevity.

    About the Author/Steve McDonald

    Steve McDonald StrataCloudSteve McDonald is Vice President of Product at StrataCloud, developer of a platform for software-defining enterprise data centers. Over the past 15-plus years, McDonald has led cross-functional teams in the delivery of innovative business initiatives, most recently at Softchoice, where he a managed a team of business development and pre-sales professionals in the United States and Canada focused on the profitable growth of the entire Cisco portfolio as well the networking category overall.