In the Information Age, every business is an information business. The differences, business to business, lie in how, when, and why they handle the information. Startups often fail because their foundation is weak. The business will often develop ideas it cannot deliver, or deliver promises before they’re ready for the road. This leaves the company searching for quality, customers, and revenue.
DevOps Makes Things Happen
DevOps conditions a software business to solve such problems. It merges thinkers and doers to make things work for your business and your customers’ needs. Variously called a “philosophy,” “culture,” and “way of thinking,” DevOps makes ideas happen.
The demands of successful DevOps may be too big for the smallest business, but even a startup should build in the strategy and tactics that cultivate the DevOps frame of mind. Because DevOps will deconstruct the functional silos that hamper agility, it is smart to facilitate seamless accountabilities from the beginning.
Most business owners see the need for information operations early. They seek to staff their systems with expertise and hands-on capabilities. As David Ingram wrote for Chron.com, “Building the right technological infrastructure for your business can help you get started.”
Operations Does Its Thing
This operations side will grow to manage the business’s hardware setup and networking. It will assure data security, backup, and help desks. And, it will integrate software applications and the solutions they were meant to serve. It’s the go-to and get-done side of Information Technology.
Operations serves to make software work and keep it from going down. Its charge is keeping things running to customer satisfaction.
Thinking of Information Technology is “so ten years ago” according to DevOps.com. If IT Operations is left to deliver other folks’ ideas and run errands for research, development, and marketing, it will become insular. As a self-contained unit, it also becomes a barrier to agility and continuous quality development.
Development Does Its Thing
Owners want to set aside the doing because they just don’t get it.They have trouble managing things they fundamentally do not understand. So, they bring in or outsource development thinking the developers speak the same language.
Developers have accountability for selecting the application stack, deploying their applications, and configuring and deploying servers. They secure customer requirements, assess current and planned designs, program and implement software developments, and test and maintain.
DevOps isn’t something you buy. It’s something you build and facilitate. So, the first stage business wants to recruit and staff its IT with talent amenable to cross-cultural and inter-functional thinking and performance.
DevOps Merges Mindsets
Matt Wilson, Founder and CEO of Stackify writes, “DevOps is evolving into letting the operations team focus on the infrastructure and IT policies while empowering the developers to exercise tremendous ownership from the OS level and up.”
Microsoft’s Saugatuck Paper calls DevOps, “the collaboration and coordination of developers and IT operations in deploying new software releases to benefit the business.”
At its best, DevOps is an architecture that integrates functionality and purpose. The focus is on synergy and agility, the ability to facilitate delivery of the developer’s innovation.
It is a working environment that functions on shared ideas and performance, that delivers on mutual interests, and that shares problems and solutions for their reciprocal value. Members from the ops tradition can coach the developers on what is doable and not. And, developers can raise the bar on operations performance.
With DevOps, shared objectives become shared work that becomes shared outcomes, dynamic outcomes from dynamic participation.