forest technologies

forest technologiesCIO guide to DevOps: The value behind the hype

How DevOps can help the modern CIO achieve their key priorities

Contents

1 Introduction

2 Speed of IT Delivery and Time to Market

3 Security

5 Aligning IT and Technology with Business Needs

7 Productivity

9 Leading Change Efforts

10 Innovation and Digital Transformation

12 Conclusion

13 About Forest Technologies

CIO guide to DevOps: The value behind the hype How DevOps can help the modern CIO achieve their key priorities

1

The last few years have seen an explosion in the

number of companies using DevOps. As the role of

technology evolves within the organisation, the role

of the CIO is also evolving. DevOps is no longer just

about speeding up application development and

deployment. It is now being used by CIOs to help

achieve key business-focused strategic goals.

As with every year, January saw a wealth of

predictions into what is likely to be keeping CIOs up

at night in 2016. We’ve selected three key pieces of

research:

• CIO UK and IDG1 research of over 100 CIOs and

Business Technology leaders

• The 2016 Gartner2 CIO Agenda Report

• The annual Society for Information Management3

(SIM) trends report into CIO priorities

From these, we’ve identified 6 recurring CIO priorities

of 2016: Speed, Security, Aligning IT and Technology with

Business Needs, Increasing Productivity, Change and

Innovation and Digital Transformation.

This whitepaper serves to explain how DevOps can

help CIOs meet these priorities.

“Boards no longer want reliable, cheap IT. They expect their CIO to ensure that technology contributes directly to the bottom line, through innovative digital re-imagining of their business.”

“This requires not only a change in culture in both the business and IT organisations, but also a change in capability, to be able to react and respond to fleeting opportunities in a timely and effective manner.”

“In my experience this flexibility and agility is only achievable affordably and at scale if organisations adopt a DevOps approach”Richard Williams, former CIO of MSIG, recognised in the

CIO100 2015 and 2016.

Introduction

2

Since IT is nowadays part of just about every business

process and product, there’s little surprise that speed

of IT delivery and time to market ranks as the SIM third

top CIO concern3.

Why is this a CIO priority?IT time-to-market “can significantly impact an

organisation’s revenue, market share, customer

acquisition and retention, employee satisfaction and

loyalty, brand image, profit margins, and more”4.

Speed of delivery has always been a concern, but in

this digital age, those who can’t significantly decrease

the time it takes to deliver software and applications,

are falling behind those that can offer more choice to

their customers, faster.

Today, companies like Amazon, Etsy, Facebook and

Google all use speed as a way to meet customer

demand5.

How can DevOps help?Speed is one of the key reasons that DevOps is

adopted into organisations. Without a doubt, if you

implement DevOps correctly, your IT team will deliver

software quicker. It’s a benefit that we discuss time and

time again in our blogs.

It’s all supported by research. A 2014 study by Gene

Kim6, and more recently the Puppet 2016 State of

DevOps report7, show that among those who have

successfully implemented DevOps:

• Lead times are an average of 2,555 times shorter

• Deployments 200 times more frequent

• Speed-to-recovery 24 times faster than those that

hadn’t.

However, it is not speed alone that makes the DevOps

culture stand out for many organisations. It is speed

along with quality and direction that CIOs need to

achieve.

Speed of IT Delivery and Time to Market

2

This effect is attained through cross-functional and

collaborative employee relationships. It is particularly

clear when teams reach continuous delivery: an effect

that pushes quality “to the left”7 and 8 in the development

cycle, and divides responsibility of quality control

across teams. The result is that quality can be built

into each stage of the development process.

DevOps influencers: Jez Humble, Nicole Forsgren, and

Gene Kim have all presented findings showing how

DevOps organisations are typically around twice as

likely to exceed their profitability and market share

goals than organisations not using DevOps.

Moving at speed without direction is unsustainable in

any organisation.

It is the combination of speed and quality provided by

DevOps that enables organisations to compete and

thrive in today’s economy.

“The goal of DevOps is to create better quality

software, faster and more repeatably. What I’ve

learned is that you can’t build quality in at the end – it

has to be part of the entire development cycle from

initial design all the way through to production.”

“Organisations that are able to build quality into the

system through DevOps practices like automating

manual processes, version control and small batch

sizes, are able to eliminate constraints on innovation

and maximize the business potential of their

investments.

“In today’s software-driven world, DevOps is no longer

optional.”

Sanjay Mirchandani, President and COO of Puppet

Speed of IT Delivery and Time to Market

3

Security has been listed as a top CIO concern for the

last decade3. It became a top 5 concern in 2015. Nearly

one-third of CIOs in the SIM annual report selected

security as a priority for 20163.

Why is this a CIO priority?Security is a must have in 2016. In an age of social

media and digital payments, where the number of

internet-connected devices is expected to reach 50

billion by 20209, who doesn’t believe that all of this data

needs to be secure?

Security issues have been at the forefront of the news

in recent years. Companies from TalkTalk to Facebook

have suffered privacy leaks. Hackers are getting

cleverer too: there’s an ever-increasing number of

different types of security threats that companies

need to be aware of, and the total cost of a data

breach is up 23% since 2013.

How can DevOps help?DevOps cannot completely eliminate cyber risk.

Nonetheless, high performing DevOps organisations

spend 50% less time remediating security issues than

low performers7. These three characteristics of allow

companies to actively respond to, and combat threats:

1 DevOps is fast Security has become a critical issue as companies

across industries have sped up their processes to

keep up with digitalisation and disruption. Using DevOps

allows companies to take advantage of speed for extra

security. Because, to go fast (and maintain the same

or higher levels of quality), DevOps teams have to

understand the entire ecosystem that they are working

in – from code to config to deployment.

That’s because an organisation is only as fast as

its slowest point: and misunderstanding in individual

processes hinders the process as a whole.

DevOps helps to ensure that this understanding

is engrained in company culture, which leads to a

reduction in the number of gaps to system access, and

improved security.

Security

4

Security

“[DevOps’] shorter cycle rate means not only new features but also quality and security improvements delivered in an impactful way for customers.”James DeLuccia, Director, Cybersecurity and Privacy

at PwC

2 DevOps is collaborative The DevOps culture of collaboration and shared

responsibility means that cross-functional teams share

security responsibilities: “quality and security are

everyone’s responsibility”7.

In other words, software developers work closely

with the teams that will be testing for security

issues, minimising room for error through increased

transparency.

3 DevOps is automated DevOps puts into place automated processes. These

processes minimise human error and enable problems

to be fixed more quickly.

Within a DevOps environment, computers monitor and

maintain vast infrastructures. They continually check

and update config to correct any inconsistencies and

potential vulnerabilities, seamlessly.

In fact, the DevOps testing regime is so rigorous that

the mean time to recovery after discovering an issue

is sped up by 24 times7.

Specific DevOps tools such as the Black Duck Hub

provide specific automation around security. Black

Duck checks code before it even reaches testing or

production stages – so that apps with any form of

vulnerability such as Heartbleed have little chance of

getting out.

“A large proportion of testing is now performed automatically every night on the integrated code base, providing fast feedback for developers and significantly reducing the likelihood of errors getting to production.” Andy Cureton, Founder & CEO, Forest Technologies

5

Aligning IT and Technology with Business Needs

Aligning IT initiatives with business needs sits as a third

highest CIO priority in 20161, despite a 19% decrease

in priority compared to 2015. The decrease, most

likely driven by the fact that a good percentage of

companies have already made strides in the space.

Why is this a CIO priority?As digital transformation takes hold of enterprises,

the role of the CIO is changing. Businesses are now

expecting CIOs to lead digital innovation and directly

impact how the organisation meets customer demand.

We are beginning to see a trend for a less technical

CIO. This CIO has a strong understanding of how

technology can be used to meet more strategic

business goals.

In today’s digital world, it is not just enabling IT to

become a ‘revenue generating’ part of a company

that the CIO must focus on. IT needs to become a key

part, and an enabler of the business. This shift of IT is

about generating top line growth rather than bottom

line saving. IT has become less of an obstruction to

business than the opportunities lost by delivering

services with less quality, speed or consistency than

competitors10.

In fact, companies able to master IT are becoming

today’s market leaders: Sainsbury’s has implemented

a digital lab to help them solve customer experience

problems and stay ahead of competitors.

How can DevOps help?DevOps was born out of the rise of IT within

organisations. It was created as a way to encourage

IT teams (in this case, developers) and business teams

(here, operations) to work together.

The pinnacle of efficiency, it incorporates agile, lean,

continuous delivery and more, to get just about

everyone – within IT and business - rowing in the

same direction, and delivering with speed, quality and

consistency.

6

Aligning IT and Technology with Business Needs

The way DevOps can help a business depends upon

specific business goals. DevOps puts a set of tools at

a company’s disposal, to solve whatever their main

issues may be.

DevOps in its nature is granular: it can (and most likely

will in the future) be used by all companies in some

way or another. It is the translation of DevOps metrics

to business benefits that CIOs must highlight, in order

to create empathy throughout organisational teams.

Successful DevOps will enable IT to understand

the needs and priorities of their business, so that

technology may be used to help.

DevOps is a means to an end: it is not adopted for IT

benefit, but for the business.

It enables IT to really drive forward business success

in a way that is not otherwise possible. DevOps

adoption does not only mean that you can deploy

code faster: it then allows you to release functionality

quicker, to jump into market faster, and to increase

period time turnover.

“Modern software delivery increasingly re-quires higher velocity, quicker iteration, and much shorter time from inception to user value. This requires strong partnerships between the business, development, and IT operations, much more so than in the past. DevOps practices and policies, along with modern tooling to provide automated Contin-uous Delivery, provide the required founda-tion for digital agility and success.”John Purrier, CTO, Automic Software and Co-Founder,

OpenStack

IT Dev Ops

BUS

7

Increasing Productivity

Although increasing productivity takes a spot on the

annual SIM trends report, “its relative importance has

dropped a bit over the last four years”3. Organisations

are currently concentrating on other issues such

as embracing innovation, digital transformation and

speed to market.

Why is this a CIO priority?For many CIOs, productivity is a ‘nice to have’ rather

than a key concern. It may be sacrificed in the short

term to achieve speed and innovation.

Whilst increased productivity does bring subsequent

benefits in operating expense and speed to market,

at the end of the day it all goes back to deepening

engagement with customers, by creating increasingly

useful applications in a more responsive manner11.

Where increase in productivity is a business objective,

DevOps holds the keys to being able to achieve.

How can DevOps help?One of the main aims of DevOps is to increase

productivity within IT teams. This is engrained in the

overall goal of increased agility and efficiency of

DevOps.

A 2014 study11 that compared productivity using the

hours spent on activities by traditional and DevOps IT

teams, found that traditional IT teams are an average

of 0.8 days less productive than DevOps teams, each

week.

Whilst DevOps teams spend more time automating

tasks, noticeable time reductions are seen in

communicating, firefighting and support.

“In the age of consumerisation of IT and IoT, its critical for organisations to respond to customer demand quickly. We believe that DevOps practices, underpinned by automa-tion software, are key enablers for business-es in becoming more agile and ultimately more successful” Todd DeLaughter, CEO, Automic Software

8

Increasing Productivity

The more recent 2016 Puppet State of DevOps report

supported this study by highlighting the cooperative,

risk-sharing, blameless, and quality-focused nature

of DevOps practices. High-performing DevOps

organisations actually spend 22% less time on

unplanned work and rework, allowing 29% more time to

be spent on “new work such as new features or code”7.

With quality built in each step, time is saved correcting

issues at the end of the developement cycle.

Forest Technologies’ customers have experienced the

following improvements, due to increased employee

productivity:

• A leading European mobile provider completed

customer facing business processes 140 times faster

• A leading online gambling company saw an 80%

reduction in deployment time

• A global supermarket chain saw a 73% reduction time

in deployments (from weeks to days!)

In order to truly achieve business productivity,

CIOs need to understand the business models and

processes that they support with technology well

enough to be able to improve them. This is something

that a limited number of CIOs are able to do. Whilst

DevOps is by no means a quick fix, the DevOps culture

aims to shed light on IT and business processes, so

that all teams can work together with transparency.

Productivity is achieved at a lower level using DevOps,

but allows high-level response to customer demands.

As today’s technology users increasingly expect

software to meet their constantly evolving needs, IT

teams need to respond to change and release updates

quickly and efficiently, without compromising on quality.

Fail to do so, and they risk driving users to competitors

or other alternatives.

9

Leading Change Efforts

Leading change efforts takes a spot as the second

highest CIO priority for 20161. Whilst noted as less of

a priority for CIOs than innovation, CIOs believe that

their board sees them as the enabler of change, more

so than innovation1.

Why is this a CIO priority?Change is the new norm in organisations. Change

allows organisations to respond easily to problems

after they happen, but, more importantly, to leverage

change within the organisation, allowing quick and

efficient response to customer needs.

Technology and the CIO role are increasingly seen as

the primary enablers of business change.

In 2016, the CIO needs to completely understand

upcoming industry changes, in order to stay ahead.

They need to be scanning the horizon at all times:

not just for new technologies, but also for business

opportunities.

How can DevOps help?DevOps culture itself is a large cultural change

that needs to be facilitated by the CIO in many

organisations.

In order for developers and operations teams to

collaborate, the two need to embrace change at a

behavioural level. Once adopted, DevOps culture

embraces change as a way to iteratively improve upon

processes.

Responding to and influencing change is a given once

an organisation has mastered moving forward with

speed and result-focus using DevOps. The DevOps

approach requires a detailed understanding of your

culture and learned behaviours. This enables the CIO to

influence changes they want to see in the organisation12,,

as well as allowing for 3 times fewer failures when

implementing change7.

Automated processes and improved time-to market

offered by DevOps further demonstrate an effective

department, which can then free up time for the CIO to

be more outward-focused. DevOps allows the CIO to

master change, so that they can focus upon business

“CIOs should be horizon-scanning at all times, not only for new technologies, but also for business opportunities as CIOs become increasingly central to business change.”Mark Chillingworth, CIO Editor, ICON Business Media

10

Innovation and Digital Transformation

Innovation and digital transformation stand out as the

top 2016 CIO concern, across publications. CIO and IDC

research1 specifically rank innovation as the top CIO

concern in 2016 (up 19% since 2015). Gartner research

highlights digital transformation is a top priority.

Whilst not entirely the same thing, innovation and

transformation projects are undertaken by businesses

looking to respond to demand, whether from internal

employees or external consumers.

These projects could be around launching new

products faster, for a lower cost, and of a higher

quality. This is key as the consumerisation of IT and

accessibility of services is eroding customer loyalty, and

making dissatisfied customers more likely to switch to

competitors.

Why is this a CIO priority?Since innovation and transformation projects are

being driven by technology and digital, the CIO is

ideally placed to facilitate and lead. However, some

CIOs report struggling to be perceived as the home of

innovation by their seniors1.

Innovation and transformation projects are at the

top of the agenda for organisations, because of the

business benefits on offer. This makes it a pivotal

moment for the modern CIO.

Do they want to stand up and lead the charge, or are

they happy to let others take the mantel: perhaps the

CDO?

How can DevOps help?By implementing DevOps, the CIO can establish a new

way of working, and begin to focus more upon business

outcomes and competitiveness.

DevOps transforms IT to deliver innovation and agility.

Just a quick glance at recent Rackspace research13

statistics (50% of organisations feel that DevOps

gives them the freedom to focus on innovation, 43%

of organisations have seen a noticeable increase in

innovation since taking up DevOps) supports this view.

But what is it about DevOps that facilitates innovation

and transformation?

“While CIOs and business technology leaders believe their CEO see the IT function as an enabler for improved business processes, they face a struggle to be perceived as the home of innovation by their seniors.” Mark Chillingworth, CIO Editor, ICON Business Media

11

Innovation and Digital Transformation

Innovation: Optimising business processes63% of CIOs are driving innovation by focusing first on

improving business processes and operations1.

DevOps is all about optimising processes: improving

the speed, quality and consistency of processes This

is not simply within IT, but organisation-wide (see

chapter 4 on aligning IT and business needs). Processes

are optimised through DevOps when continuous

deployment of IT services through is achieved using

automation.

Benefits of collaboration in terms of transformation and

innovation are:

CIOs are being allocated the task to transform the way

employees work and communicate with each other. The

DevOps culture encourages collaboration, ensuring:

• Cross-functional, aligned teams across IT and

business, able to share responsibilities and break

down communication silos.

• Risks and responsibilities are shared, meaning that

fear of failure is no longer a barrier to innovation.

• Innovation is encouraged through activities such as

“experiment days” that are often carried out under a

DevOps culture.

Digital Transformation: CollaborationA recent Raconteur article14 highlighted collaboration as

the most important tool for business transformation.

40% of organisations agree that you need collaboration

in order to innovate.

Improvingbusiness

operations& purposes

Improvingquality/

capabilitiesof our

productservices

Reducing operation

costs

Improving thefirms abilityto innovate

Acquiringand retaining

customers

Growth inemergingmarkets

Addressingrising

competitionfor your

products/services

Other

2%12%20%26%40%48%52%63%

83%Better informeddecision-making

87%Increasedproductivity

75%Reduced costs suchas travel expenses

POTENTIAL BENEFITSOF COLLABORATIONSOLUTIONS

Source: IDG Enterprise

80%Increased end-usersatisfaction

82%Alignment betweenemployees, teamsand management

12

Conclusion

DevOps is not something that teams can just decide

to do. Much like predecessors agile and waterfall, it

requires a cultural change within the IT organisation. It

therefore needs a push from those at the top: the CIOs.

The end-game is to have all stakeholders in the

delivery of IT services working collaboratively towards

the collective goal of continuous delivery of better

software: bringing a number of business benefits that

work to help the CIO deliver on their key priorities.

Whilst these priorities will continue to evolve and

develop through time, the speed, quality and

collaboration delivered by DevOps is going to be

central to future business success. CIOs that can get

on board with these processes now, are bringing their

companies into the future.

For quite some time, there has been a lot of hype

surrounding DevOps. The CIO community in particular

are always wary of hype (for very good reasons) – and

the truth is, that CIO’s don’t want DevOps: they want

the benefits of DevOps.

Hopefully this paper has gone someway to

demonstrate those real business benefits of

implementing DevOps practices.

DevOps is not the only solution for fulfilling CIO

priorities, but as we have shown, the cultural and

process changes are a great place to start.

DevOps is a means to an end. It’s the results of

DevOps that you and your board will be interested in.

How do the priorities that we’ve discussed match with

your current priorities?

Is there a need for your company to re-evaluate or

re-assess processes?

If you’re interested in finding out more about how

DevOps could specifically support some of your own

business goals, feel free to get in touch at:

hello@forest-technologies.co.uk.

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School

13

About Forest Technologies

About Forest Technologies Forest Technologies, a leader in automation and digital

transformation, helps enterprises deliver software

and software-related services faster and at a lower

cost, through the adoption of DevOps and Continuous

Delivery practices. Forest focuses on People, Process

and Tools to deliver maximum business benefit by

following their proven implementation methodology.

Forest is specialist consultancy, established in 2003

with headquarters in London and offices in the US and

Singapore. Forest has over 100 customers, from startups

to enterprises across sectors such as: Finance, Retail,

Online Gambling and Telco.

Core services include: strategy, consulting,

assessments, tool recommendations & implementation

and training.

More information can be found at

www.forest-technologies.co.uk.

13

References

1. http://www.cio.co.uk/it-strategy/2016-cio-priorities-

business-innovation-leading-change-3632831/

2. http://www.gartner.com/imagesrv/cio/pdf/cio_

agenda_insights_2016.pdf

3. http://www.simnet.org/

4. https://www.simnet.org/members/group_content_

view.asp?group=140286&id=461212

5. http://www.cio.com/article/2926724/cloud-computing/

why-fortune-1000-cios-and-ceos-should-make-devops-

investments-a-priority-now.html

6. http://www.slideshare.net/realgenekim/2014-state-of-

devops-findings-velocity-conference

7. https://puppet.com/resources/white-paper/2016-

state-of-devops-report

8. https://puppet.com/resources/white-paper/2015-

state-of-devops-report

9. https://www.pwc.com/us/en/industrial-products/next-

manufacturing/big-data-driven-manufacturing.html

10. http://www.computerweekly.com/blog/Inspect-a-

Gadget/A-visit-to-the-Sainsburys-digital-lab-using-

technology-to-solve-customer-problems

11. http://devops.com/2014/01/23/fresh-stats-comparing-

traditional-it-and-devops-oriented-productivity/

12. http://devops.com/2016/02/10/how-devops-can-

influence-culture-change-and-improve-your-business/

13. https://www.rackspace.co.uk/sites/default/files/

devops-automation-report.pdf

14. http://raconteur.net/business/driving-digital-

transformation-through-collaboration

forest technologies

Forest TechnologiesWoodyard, 52-56 Bermondsey Street, London, SE1 3UD

+44 (0) 207 403 0477hello@forest-technologies.co.uk