DevOps is a reaction to the interdependence between software development and IT operations. It aims to help organizations to produce software and services quickly. Companies that release new versions of software often need the guidance or considerations of a DevOps framework.

DevOps practices assist companies in managing the release of new versions, standardizing environments for development, testing, and production–or easing the transition between them–and allow for quicker response to issues in production by involving developer skills on the operations side. By also using tools that allow better tracking of events, control of documented processes, and issuance of granular reporting Dev and Ops can work more closely without stepping over each others’ feet.

But how often do companies practice DevOps culture or do companies really hate DevOps?

According to Rebel Labs’ DevOps Productivity Report, many organizations are not in a state to implement DevOps. Companies with problems in the release process and implementation of new versions usually have automation, but want greater flexibility to manage and conduct this process.

According to the report, as compared to traditional IT Ops teams, DevOps-oriented teams only spend 21 percent less time putting out fires on a weekly basis, 33 percent more time improving infrastructure against failures. Moreover, compared to DevOps-oriented teams, traditional IT Ops teams require nearly 60% more time per week to handle support cases.

Fears of cultural & technical gap

Oilver White, the head of RebelLabs for ZeroTurnaround, highlighted in the report that it can be difficult for staff to understand the business of the early work on deliverability but this effort generates a metric of very different but easy to understand business benefit: true completeness of functionality. Continuous delivery has a clear definition. In production, the model must not only work, but it is necessary to provide sufficient performance, security and reliability to serve users.

This difference has more to do with the cultural and technical differences between Dev and Ops teams. Organizations may believe they cannot do DevOps unless all manual tests can be replaced by a reliable fully automated suite. This is not true. There are several tools in the market such as Vagrant, Chef, Puppet, Amazon, Docker, Packer, JHipster, Selenide and others to make it easier to focus only on the technical approach to DevOps.

“It’s important that we don’t allow the gap between the cultural and technical aspects of DevOps to grow too large. But unlike the growing number of ready-made technical solutions for better development and release of apps, there are no out-of-the-box solutions for altering an organization’s culture–it requires time, energy, thought and, namely, a willingness to change things up. That cannot be acquired, only inspired,” he said.

He added that “like any socio-political movement, communicating more, and working towards a common goal instead of at loggerheads–are not happening naturally, then things must be systemically screwed up and therefore unchangeable.”

This view has been a fundamental gap in alignment between technical and cultural changes. Agile methods are adaptive and people-oriented to maximize the ability to respond to business changes. The transformation from a more traditional IT approach to a more agile-centric approach, the core being continuous delivery, will involve cultural and organizational changes.

These results may seem unbelievable at first. How can a team launching a product into production more often and still spend less time in planning processes such releases and deployment? IT has the tools, methods, and infrastructure to adopt agility now.

CIOs also must lead the modernization of old thinking about stable IT systems. They have the keys to agility and the unique leadership skills to demonstrate their value to the enterprise, both in IT and in the business overall.