How to Create an Innovative Enterprise IT Environment

The method in which people do business now has changed more rapidly than many businesses can keep up with. Staying up to date with software innovation is crucial to maintaining stable growth and continued success. This success comes down to many combined best practices and effective use of tools. CA Technologies has come up with a phrase that perfectly captures the modern IT transformation businesses are undergoing. They’ve called it the “Modern Software Factory.”

The Modern Software Factory is comprised of four key principles. These principles are agility, automation, insights, and security. Each principle impacts the way businesses operate every day. An outdated system can harm customer experience, stifle business initiatives, or cause a business to fall behind.

Each component can also be accomplished by using a managed service provider (MSP). MSPs allow enterprises to gain access to new tools through partnerships. They also help implement automation and DevOps.

Freeform Dynamics, in association with CA Technologies, released a study polling 1,279 senior IT and business professionals from companies with over 1,000 employees and at least $200m revenue. This study goes into detail about how these companies fit into the Modern Software Factory.

Freeform divided their findings into two groups, those they consider “Masters” of this new technological movement, and those that aren’t quite there yet. Their findings show that Masters have 50% higher revenue growth and 70% higher profit growth. The difference between the Masters and the rest is clear, but where does DevOps fit into all of this?

Agility

“The ability to adapt quickly and respond fast to new and changing demands, both upstream and downstream, is key to modern software development and delivery.”

This concept is straightforward, but many companies are falling behind. Implementing DevOps allows businesses to work faster with more efficiency. DevOps practices create a much more streamlined process when it comes to software integration. Ensuring that software is developed with operations in mind allows businesses to release proficient software much faster. It also allows for fixes and improvements to be executed quickly.

Automation

“As software becomes ubiquitous, it is no longer practical for it to be hand-crafted and then manually tested, implemented and maintained. The entire lifecycle from the capture and modeling of user needs onwards needs to be as automated as possible, with consistent and standardized ways of working and, of course, standard feedback processes from users, other stakeholders, and operations, to the developers.”

Improving efficiency and time-management is obviously crucial to business success. Rather than having your operations or development team spend time on a monotonous project regularly, why not automate it? The study finds that businesses with automated processes are far more effective in their software cycle. Doing things manually doesn’t make sense for IT teams.

In addition to making things easier for your team, it is usually much easier to scale production with an automated system in place. Business growth will no longer be a challenge for IT.

Insights

Having detailed knowledge of your software and systems is crucial to the success of your business in the digital space. “Developers need processes in place to monitor, sense and respond effectively.”

Customer experience is often the most critical component of any software. Utilizing customer or user feedback has never been easier. Getting the information to the right team is the most important part of capitalizing on customer feedback, though. Getting feedback and not properly using it doesn’t make much sense. Improving DevOps practices can be simple by implementing machine learning and AI, along with analytics. The proper teams learn what needs improvement and fixes faster than ever.

Tracking trends using analytics allow your team to make decisions in an informed and data-driven way. A detailed history of the problems that occur makes efficiency-related changes more valuable. The best way to improve any cloud environment is to know where consistent problems exist and who these problems impact.

Security

“Historically, security testing came late in the development process. But as development becomes more automated – and with attackers also becoming ever more agile – that approach is both too expensive and far too risky. Instead, security thinking must be integral to the entire software creation, manufacturing, and delivery process.”

With attackers being more advanced and knowledgeable than ever, proper security practices need to be fundamental in any DevOps team. Finding a vulnerability shouldn’t be a last-minute process. Fortunately, scanning tools or services can constantly be checking security issues, rather than having a member of the team do so manually. Human error should not be a factor when it comes to security. Hence, security is the perfect example of a process to automate.

In Practice

The Masters of these concepts, according to this survey, were undeniably more successful across a variety of concepts. Profit and revenue growth is the obvious one, but the Master’s were also able to excel in other important areas as well.

60% of Masters said that it was easy to attract experienced software development professionals, versus 26% from non-Masters. The Masters are clearly innovative in practice. Allowing your team, the best resources possible, through following the Modern Software Factory, creates an environment to allow the best talent to excel.

An essential mantra of DevOps is breaking down the IT silos. Silos are a menace to IT teams. 47% of Masters strongly agree that their “organization’s culture and practices support collaboration across development, operations, and IT security.” Only 17% of non-Masters strongly agree with this sentiment.

Creating an environment of trust and cooperation between teams is structurally important to the modern business. Collapsing the silos between development, security, operations and the business itself is not only easier than ever, it also more important than ever. The Modern Software Factory’s concepts directly correlate to success.