Why a DevOps approach is critical to achieve digital transformation

Why a DevOps approach is critical to achieve digital transformation

Alexis GachesTechnical Advisor – DevOps @ CA technologies

[email protected]

Digital transformation ?

Digital transformation refers to the changes associated with the use of digital technology

Digital = Investing in new technologies : mobile, big data, analytics, etc..

Transformation = Reinventing business model, customer interactions…

Why Digital transformation is critical for all organizations ?

Today, technology is becoming the biggest thing in business.

Today, companies that cannot integrate technology will be in trouble whatever industry they are in

Today’s leading companies are already becoming obsolete. In 10 years, 40% of the Fortune 500 was replaced !

Why Digital transformation is critical for all organizations ?

Web giants are growing faster than the “brick and mortar”

Traditional organizations have to take into account that they are not growing as fast as their new competitors

What are the benefits behind the Digital transformation ?

Getting performance advantage

Listen the voice of customers

Improve brand visibility and notoriety

Digital master companies increased revenue and profitability

We are in a middle of a Digital revolution…

that’s only the beginning, new technologies are coming on a very quick path (artificial intelligence, augmented

reality, internet of thing, 3D printers…)

We get inspired by the companies we all love.. What make them so different

Agile development

Deploying smaller changes means less to go wrong and it's easier to fix

Frequency

Size

Huge Change Deployed rarely(High Time to Recovery)

Tiny change Deployed often(Low Time to Recovery)

We get inspired by the companies we all love.. What make them so different

Lean Startup (react fast) : Earlier and more frequently you get working software in front of real users, the quicker you get feedback to find out how valuable it is really

Good news : Some companies already started their digital transformation successfully

Digital transformation in the bank industry - challenges

Banks have been offering products & services that were physically

distributed through branches

In most cases, each product is managed by a separate entity with

its own team

Business has been built on a core system which is complex (legacy

hard to change)

Also many companies who created an online or web channel

actually created a distinct separate channel with it’s own backend.

Digital transformation : Multichannel strategy

Objective of most banks is to adopt a customer centric approach

Multichannel require to fully integrate front office (customer facing), middle office (risk management…), and back office to increase velocity of product and customer satisfaction

Multichannel applications have strong dependencies with the rest of whole IT system… therefore developing and testing such application becomes more complex

Jake McCarthy, Group Infrastructure Architecture

CTO and DevOps lead : "What we have been looking

at within Lloyds Banking Group is how are we

transforming the business. One of the things that will

really accelerate [that transformation] is DevOps."

The same causes produce the same effects… To enable Digital Transformation organization had to redefines their SDLC to accelerate

application delivery and quality

DevOps is a huge think – But it’s not new

– Everybody has an idea of what devops is

– It is not a tool, it’s not a person our a group of people… it’s a question of culture and organization

– Very important : it is not just dev and ops

DevOps is about collaboration and tools can help to improve collaboration (not the opposite)… Tools can help people talk the same language

DevOps - Cultural aspects

DevOps adoption is hard because it’s a disruptive methodology (impacts organization, role & responsibility, process .. Etc..)– Needs a top down approach

– Most traditional organizations are very resistant to change

– Even so, it is not straight forward

Start where it hurts

Build a team responsible for trying this new approach… but to increase its chance of success, need to find a good candidate : Highly visible & strategic project

DevOps – SDLC aspects

“Shift left” strategy to support high deployment frequency without sacrificing quality : QA team is involved early in the development cycle

To reduce risk, an end to end testing approach is required in multichannel applications

Due to the complexity of a bank environment, providing production like environments for each dev/test team is hard and costly. Instead, they adopted virtualization solution

What concrete benefits so far… by Nick Stemp – principal lead architect

It used to take us five people days to do 20 tests. Now it takes one minute to do the same.

We’re seeing more defects in development, which is where we want to see them.

We saw savings in terms of cost of licenses for some of the infrastructure

Reduce the number of local testing environments

Digital transformation requires speed, agility, and 24/7 performance

DevOps helps to

Increase collaboration between departments

Increase deployment frequency

Improve quality

Reduce cost on development and operations

Why a DevOps approach is critical to achieve digital transformation ?

Thank You