The end of silos. Development and Operations together as one. Nonstop improvements throughout the application development cycle. DevOps brings a win-win-win proposition for application developers, IT operations and the business. All these things sound great – and they can become a reality – but nobody said it was easy.

DevOps is just as much about people and process as it is about technology.  It is about continual improvements throughout the lifecycle of application development.  The key to success? Strong leadership. This is a cultural shift that demands buy-in from management and strong leadership to maintain progress along the way.  IT organizations need to change how they do things, and their leaders need to mandate that they do.  Enterprises would not need to compromise quality for higher speed and costs.  DevOps helps achieve high quality applications, faster and less expensive, not cheap, low quality applications.

DevOps means integration and collaboration among software application developers and IT operations professionals. Having a good relationship between these two teams is important for companies hoping to transform their business model to deliver services faster. Strategic DevOps approaches help developers and operational staff to do more meaningful and strategic activities, and cut out the tedious repetitive tasks.  (Usually people enjoy doing the strategic, not the repetitive cumbersome tasks.)  DevOps also helps minimize errors, thus creating higher quality applications.

DevOps methodology has morphed the way many things have done so before. Having the right leadership for this shift is imperative and will not happen overnight – this is why CIOs and Directors of IT must take the reins of the DevOps strategy.

DirecTV is one example of an organization on the journey to DevOps success. The company quickly understood DevOps to be a strategic business issue at the CIO level, instead of treating it as just a fleeting technology trend. Cultural and organizational changes aren’t easy, but having the CIO give a clear mandate is the right start – it’s up to the CIO to ensure the IT organization is managed differently.

The benefits are real and worthwhile. A DevOps approach will give app development teams much-needed access to resources, the time and environment in which to test, and the freedom to create better applications. At the same time, it will also offer IT operations better control over app behavior in production – before they’re deployed.

Once the organization decides to adopt a DevOps methodology, traditional roles and responsibilities have to change. Consolidation and automation will happen. And as a result, feathers may be ruffled. But, with the right leaders in place, an organization can and will achieve the common goal of developers and IT operations: efficient, high-quality apps and services for the business.

About the Author

Shridhar Mittal, General Manager, Service Virtualization, CA Technologies

As general manager of the Service Virtualization business, Shridhar is responsible for driving the company’s mission to help enterprises deliver innovative new software and services to market without constraints: better, faster and cheaper than their competition.

Shridhar draws on his more than 20 years experience in the software industry to lead a world-class global community that combines research, development, product management and solutions engineering to drive the company’s Service Virtualization business.

Shridhar comes to CA Technologies as a result of the ITKO acquisition. As Chief Executive Officer at ITKO, he guided the company into a strong position across the highly specialized Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) field.