The rapid adoption of technology is causing significant changes in the market in terms of how organizations acquire, produce and manage technology solutions. In this article, you will learn how BizDevOps trend is shifting the evolution of digital leadership, responsibility and capability outside the IT organization, where tech-savvy business stakeholders increase their involvement in selecting their own systems and tools, wresting control from centralized IT departments.
DevOps Principle
Process and app digitalization have been in the hands of the Dev and Ops teams for a few decades now. DevOps principle is earned by IT and the cultural change bridges the gap between teams.
The typical workload distribution was then, business asking for features – Dev building the app and/or the process – Ops providing the platform.
- Businesses asking for features to:
- improve their productivity
- attract new clients and markets
- develop customer’s loyalty
- stay ahead of the competition
- etc.
Dev building the app and/or the process to cover the business needs and requests.
Ops provides the platform to host the digital assets covering the main aspects of IT Infrastructure like:
- Security
- Performance
- High Availability
- well-oiled deployment processed (Dev/User Acceptance Testing/Test/Prod)
Yet, this common way of working in the digital world is coming to an end. Indeed, companies must face IT resource scarcity (not enough tech specialists and resources), and in the meantime the increasing need for digitalization.
- In the next 5 years, 500 million of new apps will be built: more than all apps built in the last 40 years!1
- However, 86% of organizations already struggle to find technical talents to build products.2
- IT infrastructure technical debt management is increasing over time.
What is BizDevOps?
Facing those challenges, the BizDevOps approach creates a bridge between the business and the tech teams in the loop of digital asset creation. BizDevOps is a way, a culture, that enables digital asset development through close collaboration and shared knowledge between the business, developers, and operations teams.
This alignment is led by the common goal of improving solutions and customer experiences to achieve business goals and increase business outcomes.
The classic DevOps representation is thus updated with a new player: the Business.
Introducing Citizen Dev: a key pillar of BizDevOps
Before business was just asking for features, then testing the DevOps delivery’s quality. Now, they are also responsible for creating robust features and applications together with the IT teams. Indeed, BizDevOps shifts the typical workload distribution by bringing tools to the business so they can build part of the digital assets themselves. But how to call those new players in the DevOps journey? They don’t have any coding skills, but they are capable of developing business apps: the Citizen Devs are coming!
How to do BizDevOps?
To do so, companies need to provide a new set of software that allows business users to build workflows and applications independently. Starting with Low-Code Platforms to empower business users, they will gradually become Citizen Developers, building applications without any coding skills. In the meantime, reducing the workload of IT developers will allow them to focus on higher value-added and more complex missions.
Moreover, by empowering business users to digitalize their process on low-code platforms that have been selected together with the IT, BizDevOps provides a new way of development:
Why implement BizDevOps?
Many benefits go along with this new approach:
- Tasks distribution is more consistent: IT can concentrate on complicated and differentiating value tasks, whereas businesses have more problem-solving capabilities in their hands.
- Biz – Dev – Ops alignment: everybody is collaborating to reach a common goal of improving solutions and experiences for customers.
- Go to market is accelerated by speeding the development and delivery of applications.
- Associated risks with Shadow IT are reducing.
What are the Challenges?
The main challenge you will face is to bring this new culture into your company. Transformation and adoption of a new approach always take time and collective efforts so you will need the following:
- Sponsorship of the board
- Great learning/adoption roadmap
- Governance plan
- Citizen Devs candidates in every department (at least one by area of expertise)
- Erase any remaining walls between the main teams involved
- Find a technical partner to support this change (CBTW for instance)
In this era of digital transformation acceleration, coming together with IT Developers shortage, CBTW has developed a service offer to support our clients to:
- Improve your digital skills learning/coaching culture
- Accelerate your digital assets’ Go-To-Market
- Choose the right Low-Code Platform
- Follow a proven methodology to speed up app and process digitalization
- Reduce your dependency on the IT delivery team
Resources
- https://brainhub.eu/library/bizdevops-in-nutshell
- https://www.mendix.com/citizen-developers/
- https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/enterprise-low-code-application-platform
- 1 IDC FutureScape: Worldwide IT Industry 2020 Predictions, October 2019
- 2 Patrick Moorhead. Microsoft goes all-in on hybrid Cloud and Edge at Ignite 2019, citing Indeed survey, Forbes.com, Nov 2019