As DevOps melds the diverse cultures of developers and operations, a new cultural mindset is emerging that joins business and information technology into one.

“BizOps is really about putting a lens on this critical element … that we need to fuse business and IT; that IT needs to transform itself to recognize that it’s this value generator, it’s not a cost center,” said Serge Lucio (pictured), general manager of the Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom Inc.

Lucio spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the DevOps Virtual Forum. They discussed the cultural changes underway in how information technology workers do their jobs. (* Disclosure below.)

DevOps teams fuse minds through spiritual colocation

That COVID has created a wave of change through business is no secret. The long-lasting ripples are being felt in the DevOps community, where close-knit teams are forced to work apart. But is the secret to DevOps success really built on physical closeness? No, according to Jeffrey Hammond, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. Coining the term “spiritual colocation,” Hammond says, “It’s not so much the fact that we’re together looking at each other across the table; it’s the fact that we’re able to get into a shared mind space.”

Lucio agrees. “It’s really about fusing those teams around kind of the common purpose, a common objective,” he said.

As BizOps aims to unify IT behind a common goal, it has spotlighted an identity crisis within the multiple methodologies that drive the development pipeline. While DevOps, Agile, site reliability engineering and value stream management all share many of the same set practices and the common goal of accelerating mean time-to-feedback, they do not have a common feedback for communication, according to Lucio.

“When you talk about DevOps, we all start thinking about this continuous delivery pipeline that basically drives the automation, the orchestration across the team. But … at the end of the day, it’s all about what is the mean time-to-feedback to these teams. How do you provide that feedback to the different stakeholders across the life cycle in a very timely matter?” he asked.

BizOps can provide that framework, according to Lucio. IT needs to understand the core values and principles that it needs to embrace to change from cost center to value center.

BizOps provides the framework to unify IT

Unless the industry unifies in an understanding of those core values and principles, it could end up creating more of the silos it set out to destroy, according to Lucio.

“My hope is that we start to organize a lot of our practices, language and cultural elements,” he said. “It’s really about focusing on the business outcomes, on aligning, on driving engagement across the teams, but not to create a new set of silos which instead of being vertical are going to be these horizontal products.”

The way to do this is through collaborative tools driven by automation and artificial intelligence that can identify anti-patterns and give real-time understanding of actions, according to Lucio.

“One of the things that’s amazing is now we have access to tons of data not just from a given customer, but across a large number of customers. And so we can start to compare how all of these teams operate and what’s working, what’s not working,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the DevOps Virtual Forum. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the DevOps Virtual Forum. Neither Broadcom Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE