DEV Community: Felipe Corniani de Genaro

How do DevOps interact with Digital Transformation.

Felipe Corniani de Genaro — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 03:09:36 +0000

How could people and culture interfere on the business model and how business activities can leverage opportunities all based on customer info.

Today Digital Transformation is the key of any company operating and DevOps is an essential component for this successful path by improving speed, overall collaboration and the customer experience. There are some challenges to pass over, like culture, skills, program investment and leadership alignment.

Companies usually want to add more tools and improve their process, but they normally overlook the cultural changes that are required to make these transactions between technical and non-technical teams. With DevOps, you make it easier for your development and operational team to work together. Adding interactions within stakeholders and your business unit, you can set a collaborative tone.

You can't Lean, Agile or DevOps your way around a bad organizational culture. You must know the entire context to propose solutions and tools there are relevant to your environment.

Creating a solid engineering culture around the business, all through learning and knowledge sharing across teams. Shared responsibilities are the core of DevOps.

"you build it, you run it", besides "you build it, you secure it".
DevOps and security should go hand in hand.

Also, pay attention to do not automate a bad process, first of all, find a plausible solution and then find the tools to approach them.

DevOps, in general, are tools to improve your infrastructure, increasing and speed up the software delivery through automation of operations and process to exceed the customer expectations.

The customer nowadays wants to be "always-on" whatever the device they are using at any time of the day. Forget the "downtime", "temporary outage", etc. DevOps practices aim to provide an uninterrupted positive end-user experience.

The configuration of environments to your applications now will be pieces of code; Docker and Kubernetes are virtual machines roughly saying, so your infrastructure are some parameters in a few files, they are called manifests. With that, you can develop, build and deliver anywhere. This is the base of continuous integration and continuous delivery.

Now you will deliver small pieces of code, which will be tested before implementation and will be included automatically after passing the test through your pipeline.

Later, your container is made to die, whenever it is necessary to add or change your environment, your container will be prepared to die and give way to a new set of required statements, also your databases and related stuff.

"fail often, fail fast, fail cheap".

To create a DevOps transformation, you need to understand that you're building a service. It will be the implementation of a new service to all the people who are responsible for delivering software, approaching to ensure that everyone would have what they need to do their job and deliver high-quality software.

Establish a clear focus on the entire delivery pipeline, from developer to production. Think about everyone who has a role in getting your application running. Create feasible overall goals on every release, and then think about how you want to track the progress toward those goals.

Communication is crucial, so let the leadership aware of what is going on, they need to have a total commitment, they are how will provide resources for you to continue your transformation.

For agility and collaboration to be successful, leadership at all levels needs to encourage and support it among employees, it also requires a significant shift in mindset and behaviour, and support of that needs to come from the top, which allows teams to be more receptive to the changes.

Build an MVP of the DevOps transformation, show the whole organization about it, show them your goals and results, doing that you will increase the collaboration, DevOps is a culture, the need to get used to, for that they need to believe.

Standardize your software delivery process, with that you can assign metrics easier and track down the results.

DevOps are fundamentals of a modern software factory and although they will not solve all software development problems, they are essential in addressing how companies can improve their engagement with customers and key business stakeholders.

These practices will also help organizations keep up with the continuously changing, and unpredictable, business environment.

I hope that article helps you to understand i little bit more about DevOps and what impacts this culture has on your organization digital transformation.

My regards.
Felipe Genaro.

Are you handling with Digital Transformation the right way ??

Felipe Corniani de Genaro — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 21:22:44 +0000

What is Digital Transformation exactly, what’s your pillars and how it interacts with other already known paradigms.

First of all, Digital Transformation is not more usage of IT Technologies, taking advantage of tools to improve your process and data. Before, you need to take note of some terminologies.

Digitation is transforming your analogue resources into digital form. Papers and human process becoming bytes and online workflows.

Digitalization is about tools within technology. Embark your project, use wearables, automate and update the communication and media infrastructures. You can use cognitive computing for data analyses, software test automation, internet of things, etc.

In a formal way to say, Digital Transformation is the use of digital technologies to upgrade your internal operations and change process, to create an entire organizational transformation. Acting directly with the digital economy and digital innovation, building new business models, in order to improve the customer experience, providing society transformation with value creation refining products and services.

Elaborating, Digital Transformation consists of the core of the supply chain, providing new outcomes. It is related to the customer itself, focusing on the organizational change to deliver new value schemes for them. Building a cross-functional team and enabling holistic thinking. Creating a customer-driven-strategic and business transformation that need cross-organizational changes.

You already need to be resilient to deal with expected and unexpected changes but now, you need to handle paradigm shifts, and that put down slow and subtle transformations that redefine the essence of the industry. They are not quantifiable and have the capacity to disrupt the core essence of the industry.

The Digital Transformation brings us some paradigms that together create a brand new environment, combining issues with resource allocation, risk management and cost containment. Passing through all of that, you can achieve Digital Maturity Assessment. And you’ll be able to completely understand the customer needs and expectations, which are the goal of Digital Transformation.

Digital Transformation works directly with business models, people, culture, leadership and change. It is a profound transformation of business activities and competencies to fully leverage the opportunities of digital technologies. Understanding your customer and conducting your team through it, you can create your framework for your business model, based on customer info that might complement or even supplement its current business and market. You need to bring some comfort to your customers, have compassion, understand your emotions, with that you build real value in a relationship.

The keynote speaker Greg Verdino once says, “Digital Transformation closes the gap between what digital customers already expect and what analog business actually deliver”.

You need to be careful with what and how much you change; you cannot impact the quality of customer relationships. Take a bank business for instance, this from ages represents a close relationship between the enterprise and its customers. This relation is basically built on trust, a human concept. Nowadays banks are full of digital channels, to bring more comfort and agility in your actions with customers, using chatbots and providing means for helping them to make buying decisions.

So you are creating a paradox, the customer opinions and expectations are getting influenced before they have any real human interaction, you are replacing humans by the digital channels since those chatbots cannot understand emotions, as sarcasm or cynicism for example. How can enterprises want to create a meaningful and long-lasting relationship with customers, if there is hardly any real interaction with humans ??

While you are adopting more digital channels to improve the communication and interactions with your customers, that will be creating a void between the company and them. Therefore, you’ll have impacts directly on the quality of customer relationships, and that is one critical pillar of the bank industry.

Let’s finish talking about what it is not Digital Transformation:

Digital Transformation is not an IT initiative. Essentially is to create models to customer-driven-strategic and problem-driven, providing a competitive advantage.

Digital Transformation is not Data Management, on the wise of capture and storage, it improves the business process and defines every data field to be a business utility, providing completely data consumption, improving decision making.

Digital Transformation is not fancy dashboards or colourful infographics full of machine learning and AI. Actually is uses quality data together with your customer, questioning assumptions about his business environment.

The void between the customers and the human part of enterprises is getting wider every day. In general, you need to be careful to not misunderstand the concepts of the Digital Transformation, so that you don’t make hasty decisions or make mistakes in your implementation.

I hope that article helps you to understand some terms about Digital Transformation and how Digital Transformation should work as well as figure out what is and what is not Digital Transformation.

My regards.
Felipe Genaro.