In recent years the term DevOps has become a buzzword within the IT industry. DevOps has become such a buzzword that many organizations have created roles like "DevOps Engineering" to create automated processes between development and operations, but one should ask if automation is the answer to DevOps for an organization or is it just the first attempt at DevOps maturity on a much longer journey. Much like the IT Industry buzzword "cloud" many IT Leaders have put a ton of their budget and resources toward DevOps without fully understanding how DevOps accelerates business delivery. Furthermore, in many organizations the concept of DevOps is seen as a tool selection and implementation versus a business process and cultural change. Like any other IT industry buzzword, getting the value of a IT buzzword like DevOps can be completely different from what is talked about at conferences and by the water cooler.

DevOps was coined a term several years ago to represent the processes and communication associated with delivering a business solution between development, operations, test and business owners.

In the past before DevOps, the time and effort required to move a business solution from "Requirement from the Line of Business" to "Developed and Tested Application" to "Production business solution in the Data Center" was long and expensive. In today's market customers expect that every interaction with a business be personalized and adapt with their feedback they give to the business. This drives businesses to change the long and expensive aspects of delivering business value. So back to the original question… Does DevOps accelerate business delivery?

The answer is simple; although more of a journey to implement… Yes, DevOps accelerates business delivery tremendously if DevOps is implemented by taking into account the underlying goals of all the organizations involved.

• Business Owners — Interested in delivering solutions to their customers to increase revenue or reduce cost to the organization
• Development — Interested in creating the solutions for the business based on the business requirements.
• Operations — Responsible for providing Development resources for creating solutions and ensuring every solution introduced into production performs well, stable and recoverable in the event of a disaster.

When you breakdown the goals of each organization you can see the conflicting goals of the different organizations involved in the DevOps puzzle and why traditionally the "bang head here" wall exist between development and operations. So how do you successfully remove the "bang head here" wall and ensure that DevOps accelerates business delivery?

To ensure the "bang head here" wall is removed and DevOps accelerates business delivery all organizations must adopt business processes and communication channels that support the goals of each organization. Automation of these business processes and communication is critical to getting the greatest acceleration of business delivery, but communication and business process with executive sponsorship across the organization is the most critical part of a successful DevOps implementation.

ServiceNow's Enterprise Service Management platform is uniquely positioned to facilitate the business processes and communication required maximize the business acceleration DevOps provides to the business. To read more about the best practices around implementing DevOps along with a real world example with lessons learned I recommend reading the "How DevOps can accelerate business delivery?" white paper.