The religious poet George Herbert is credited with the quote, "Why should we fear change? All life is change." And in organizations around the world today, two attitudes coexist in the face of the avalanche of challenges posed by a changing and constantly accelerating market: the attitude of fear and the attitude of agility. Agility as a business concept, which is cloaked in so much technology and technical jargon that it invites us to drown in a frenzy of slang, is first and foremost an attitude. And that attitude is what sets apart business leaders who are capable of dealing with their circumstances from those who either step aside on their own or will be overwhelmed by their environment.
To keep our finger on the pulse of what 2020 will bring in terms of the termagile, which 19 years after its first definition is now a staple of all management manuals, we wanted to draw on one of the leading websites on the subject, Enterprisers Project. More than just an informative website, it is an online project that defines itself as "a community that helps CIOs and IT leaders solve problems." One of its most recent publications identifies what, in the opinion of its authors, are the 10 key trends in DevOps (in a very, very, very summarized form: Development + Operations) for the long year ahead.
1. Without collaboration, there is no Agile or DevOps.
Convergence is not only inevitable, it is necessary. Gone are the days of reserving the terms "agile" and "devops" for technology departments, and gone are the days of company management asking their departments to "become agile." If you want results, you need to speed up communication between employees in different roles so that they can share their experiences using agile methodologies. With answers to questions such as "How does it help you?", "How has it changed you?", "How can we collaborate more closely based on what we have learned?" Anyone who wants to stay out of the information exchange will gradually be left out of any option to be efficient in their work.
2. It's not that you lack talent, it's that you don't develop it.
Eleven out of twenty decision-makers want their DevOps teams to be created from within the organization, because that is the way to deal with budget constraints, but internal talent does not always emerge when it should. The solution? Take the example of FedEx and its internal training university, which teaches its own engineers modern technologies and software development. The results? The university has retrained more than 2,500 software programmers. Anyone who takes note of this company will be on the right track with their "agile" journey.
3. Next stop: the T-shaped professional
In addition to training in new skills, there is an increasing emphasis onsoft skills, which are no longer optional but a basic requirement. Empathy and customer experience are vectors for breaking down silos, leading to a "T" shape in the mindset of a good professional, with depth of knowledge on the one hand but also breadth of vision on the other. This pressure is seen as a seed of innovation, which will have the direct benefit of that breadth in turn leading to a greater aspiration for greater depth. A virtuous circle.
4. Don't say "work done"; say "value created."
It's called Value Stream Mapping. If the world has changed, it makes no sense for us to define "done" in the same way as yesterday. No one can consider that they have "done their job" if there is no value achieved. For those who are resistant to this change, it will obviously mean longer hours, less success, and greater frustration. For those who understand that this consists of getting teams to conceive of an end-to-end life cycle, collaboration will generate synergies, efficiency, and optimization of time and resources. It consists of generating data that allows for the automation of results, which in turn will generate new data. Again, a virtuous circle.
5. Don't hesitate: you will feel (technologically) more fatigued.
If someone like Eveline Oehrlich, chief research analyst at the DevOps Institute, says so, there is no doubt that it will be so. To quote her, and without wishing to discourage anyone: "The number of tools and frameworks in technology is daunting. The challenges faced by IT teams in understanding, interconnecting, and applying them will continue, and in 2020, there is no real solution in sight." Fierce competition, thousands of demands for attention in the form of requests, proposals, ideas, queries, doubts, and a market open to anyone's participation can be enough to drive anyone crazy. Yes, automation is necessary, but above all, no one should "lose sight of the real problems they are trying to solve and how they can get there by leveraging their own teams."
6. Measure for the sake of measuring, no; but don't measure for the sake of not measuring, even less so.
Unfortunately for those who want to try shortcuts, Peter Drucker's quote is still perfectly valid: "What gets measured gets managed." However, what is coming to an end is the festival of measuring in an ethereal way and without a real purpose. If measuring is important, it is increasingly important to agree on what to measure, because the flow of measurable data will continue to grow. "Those seeking support can rely on the performance metrics described in the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) study, which cites five Software Delivery and Operational Operational (SDO) measures that can be used as key indicators of success for high-performance DevOps teams," adds the original text in this regard.
7. Employment crisis? Not in the DevOps field
Employees who continue down the DevOps path in 2020 will see benefits that go directly to their wallets and job satisfaction. Automation will allow employees to work on more value-added work rather than mundane manual tasks, resulting in greater job satisfaction and reduced stress levels. Engineers focused on automation and collaboration will see their salaries increase significantly, and as investments increasingly revert to strategic IT support, professionals who align themselves with IT objectives and functions will see their commitment backed by the company.
8. Acronym: ITIL v4
This is not the time or place to get overly technical, but if you want to be agile and you've never heard of the "Information Technology Infrastructure Library," or ITIL for short, it might be a good idea to have someone look into it (or do it yourself). ITIL reaches its fourth version in 2020, and its purpose is clear: agile techniques for the development and management of software products with a focus on joint value creation in a way that reduces waste.
9. Change is generational, and now you will understand why.
The number of people who remember the days "before DevOps" will become increasingly small. The younger generation of workers in today's teams do not remember the "strict silos, with clear lines around areas of responsibility such as infrastructure, operations, application design, development, testing, and security." They do not remember how this caused a lot of transition work between teams and groups. They don't know that product owners, business analysts, architects, developers, testers, release managers, system administrators, and infrastructure owners had to agree and coordinate the planning, development, testing, deployment, operation, and management of a piece of software," Oehrlich explains firmly, reinforcing his point with a resounding: "Just writing that sentence was exhausting; imagine living it."
10. And, as expected, the star will be Artificial Intelligence.
It is no surprise that AI and machine learning (ML) are considered the most important business technologies of the coming decade. So much so that it is not trivial to start talking about AIOps in the same way that we are witnessing the normalization of the term DevOps. In 2020, we expect to see exponential growth in the adoption of these tools, which automate the ingestion of rapid volumes of data, use ML to analyze the data, and have the ability to leverage knowledge for automation or decision-making.
What is your attitude toward this wave of trends? If it is one of fear, change it. If it is one of agility, you are in luck: you have the foundation to lead not only in 2020, but in the years to come.
Original publication: 10 DevOps Trends to Watch in 2020
Photo byGiu VicenteonUnsplash
