Companies in industries as diverse as banking and manufacturing are realizing that in order to remain competitive, they must become software-driven organizations. From customer-driven digital transformation to cloud computing for the back office, software is eating the world – one enterprise at a time.
Enterprises have depended upon software for decades, of course. What’s different now is how modern advances in information technology are increasingly able to change the fundamentals of business itself via sophisticated automation and acceleration of every aspect of the organization.
We’re gradually eliminating everything about big companies that slows them down. The result is organizations at velocity – agile enough to innovate and fast enough to deal with any change that comes their way.
Today’s better-faster-cheaper technology, however, is not the whole story, as tools are only as good as the people wielding them. The more fundamental story here is the organizational and cultural transformation necessary to take full advantage of modern tech. Business at velocity depends upon such transformation.
“CEOs don’t know what it feels like to run an organization that generates high velocity, high quality output,” according to Adam Jacob, Chief Technology Officer for infrastructure automation firm Chef Software.
As my previous article on Chef’s recent conference explained, Chef is at the center of an enterprise cultural movement known as DevOps – and Jacob is one of the primary visionaries behind the DevOps movement.
DevOps, however, has proven hard to define. “DevOps is the experience of people who are using it to transform their businesses,” Jacob says. “DevOps is unique to every person who ever tries to do it.”
Perhaps the most striking misconception about DevOps is that it is about building software – in large part due to the formation of the term as a portmanteau of “development” and “operations.” True, DevOps involves a rethink of these phases of the software lifecycle to be sure – but that’s just the beginning.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/04/09/software-and-devops-are-eating-the-world/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Chef Software covered the cost of Jason Bloomberg’s travel to ChefConf, a standard industry practice. Image credit: Chef Software.
