Why the Business Side of Digital Should Embrace DevOps

I have seen business eyes glaze over when the details of development like waterfall and agile are discussed. But with digital transformation, now is the time for businesses to be wide-eyed and conversant in DevOps, an outgrowth of agile. The simple truth is that businesses need DevOps if they want to be at the mature level in their digital transformation.

Digital transformation is centered around applying technologies, enhanced processes and new people skills so businesses can accelerate revenue growth and bring in more profitable revenue. This means being agile not only on the technology side but on the customer side too.

Specifically what I mean is that user experiences are in fact agile. Today, marketing groups its users into segments which are slivers of time. Not very agile. What they should be doing is developing experiences similar to creating scenes of a movie. Check out my article "How to Match Digital Experience Tactics to User Scenarios."Waterfall and Agile development align with segmented user experiences. Where DevOps aligns with scenario experiences, which I describe as scenes from a 24/7 movie. 

This May, 2016 commercial from SAP gives an idea of what I mean by scenarios. SAP is on point with the future of experience. Their tagline, "Use live data to predict customer trends - live and in the moment."


This woman's experiences are changing minute by minute, and this business team sees the need to keep changing along with her. Even predicting the future.

This means that the "work" to support scenarios needs to be agile too. And not only the work but the development. A continuous design led capability needs to be put in place, i.e. agile design that can read and respond to ever changing scenes across a spectrum of audiences.

The right experience category tactics [value, communication and operational] need to be designed to support these scenarios, and a perpetual experience engine needs to be revved up to deliver these tactics as demanded by the targeted user.

The development of tactics and engine configuration would be a perpetual effort too. Similar to 1:1 but difference is that there are multiple experience categories being configured through the day based on which scene the end user is experiencing. Not just text and images.

The business should understand that DevOps is the enabler in supporting a dynamic user experience. Development using DevOps would be able to deliver a continuous supply of tactics that would be able to support the continuous demand of end user experiences. "What is she into now?"

DevOps is a software development approach which involves continuous development, continuous testing, continuous integration, continuous deployment and continuous monitoring of the software throughout its development life cycle. The intention of DevOps is to create better-quality software more quickly and with more reliability while causing greater communication and collaboration between teams. It is critical for the business to understand this and the opportunity it provides to meet customer demands.

Maybe scene based experiences and a perpetual experience engine is too forward thinking for some businesses, but embracing DevOps will put a business in a position to execute on this kind of need in the future and move them to a digitally mature position.
Location: Philadelphia, PA, USA

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