The FINANCIAL — International Data Corporation (IDC) announced a new report, IDC MaturityScape Benchmark: DevOps in the United States. The new report presents the results of IDC’s 2014 DevOps MaturityScape Benchmark Survey and is a supplement to IDC MaturityScape: DevOps. Together, they provide a comprehensive overview of the IDC MaturityScape model for DevOps, which is designed to help organizations assess their DevOps maturity level against industry benchmarks. IDC believes that DevOps will be adopted (in either practice or discipline) by 80% of Global 1000 organizations by 2019, according to International Data Corporation (IDC).
DevOps offers IT organizations a tremendous opportunity to transform how companies develop, deploy, and manage IT services. According to Stephen Elliot, Research Vice President of IDC’s IT Infrastructure and Cloud practice, DevOps “One of the most revealing aspects of this benchmark research is that a growing number of IT organizations are using new automation and performance management tools across both the development and operations teams, and linking these projects through DevOps practices. These organizations are delivering business value in the form of cost avoidance, while increasing the speed and quality of their customer impactful services.”
The biggest challenge, according to the report, is getting started and selecting which project to start with. Many starting points include automated testing, continuous delivery or integration, application performance management, application performance and analytics, or automated change and configuration management projects.
For most large IT organizations, DevOps impact has been seen through process standardization, and there is an increased focus on teamwork across development and operations teams. However, organizations are taking various approaches to breaking down silos and bringing cross-functional SMEs together.
Often, IT’s culture is the biggest DevOps adoption barrier that can demotivate projects. Organizations need to put more effort into creating an IT culture of collaboration, teamwork, sharing, empathy, communication, trust, quality, and the need for measurement/metrics to achieve long-term improvement.
Organizations deploying 3rd Platform solutions in DevOps profit by driving tighter collaboration across business stakeholders and development, test deployment, application support, and operations teams, according to IDC.
IDC MaturityScape on DevOps consists of five stages: ad hoc, opportunistic, repeatable, managed, and optimized. To help organizations assess their current status and needs, IDC also measured maturity across the five key dimensions of the IDC MaturityScape framework. To view the opportunities and challenges more clearly as IT moves through the various stages of DevOps maturity, organizations need to understand the following five critical dimensions: People, Culture, Technology, Business, and Process. According to results:
Many organizations are still at the opportunistic stage for all five dimensions of DevOps maturity, with a minimal number of organizations at the ad hoc stage. Overall, DevOps capabilities are consistent across the people, technology, and process dimensions, according to IDC.
Less than one-tenth (9.2%) of the respondents are at the optimized stage in the culture dimension, while more than twice that many (20.2%) are at the optimized stage in the business dimension. Most IT organizations today have a better understanding and acceptance of the requirements and needs to achieve a desired state for business alignment, strategy execution, and budgeting than the relentless courage and risks required to drive cultural change.
Cultural transformation is at the heart of DevOps practices and a core impact point for achieving DevOps success. This disparity is also reflected in over half (53.7%) of respondents indicating that they are at the opportunistic stage in the culture dimension, while the counterpart percentage for the business dimension is 41.7%. These results show that organizations should put more effort into creating an IT culture of collaboration, teamwork, sharing, empathy, communication, trust, quality, and the need for measurement/metrics, according to IDC.
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