Unlocking The ROI of DevOps Innovation with These 5 Methods

According to MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte, organizations farther along in their digital maturity don’t just innovate more — they innovate differently. 81% of digitally mature companies cited their innovation as a strength, compared to only 10% of other organizations.

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How does digital maturity drive innovation? By adopting DevOps strategies, organizations free up time and resources to spend on innovation and improvement. Innovation is a critical component of digital disruption, driving productivity and improving ROI.

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Take these five steps to improve the ROI of DevOps innovation within your organization.

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1. Assess Your Organization’s Risk Tolerance

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Your organization’s risk tolerance will play a big role in determining how much you can innovate. In DevOps, there are five major risk profiles: Entrants, Competitors, Contenders, Leaders, and Disruptors.

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Disruptors bear the brunt of the risk, but also reap the greatest rewards. Entrants may not engage in any risk at all, but as a result they arrive late to the party. Most companies reside somewhere in between. They want to innovate but also seek to minimize their exposure to risk. This is why many companies adopt DevOps strategies: to increase their digital maturity so they can innovate more, with less risk.

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To begin unlocking DevOps ROI, understand where you are on the risk-to-innovation scale — and where you want to be. 

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2. Build a Seamless Flow of Information

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Seamless communication is at the heart of DevOps success. Fast feedback loops are what make innovation and resilience possible. Because CI/CD processes are collaborative efforts that rely on shared data, they cannot exist within a traditional, siloed development environment.

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Traditional development models siloed data — each department and team shared information only as needed. DevOps innovation requires the seamless flow of data throughout an organization, including between departments.

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To achieve better ROI through DevOps innovation, organizations must ensure their teams have the resources they need to work together successfully. By creating an ecosystem that fosters collaboration, an organization empowers its teams to pursue innovation.

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3. Develop Better Processes In Addition to Better Software

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Innovation is driven through people, processes and technology. DevOps strategies and technologies all contribute to a larger ecosystem; there is no one technology or process that “is DevOps.”

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Low-code systems drive innovation by removing traditional barriers to development. When low-code technologies combine with DevOps strategies and CI/CD practices, they create the conditions where a culture of innovation can emerge. Tools don’t create culture. But new tools can lay the groundwork for new processes and get people thinking in new ways. Without DevOps strategies and CI/CD practices, however, your low-code systems won’t reach their full potential.

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By supporting your DevOps technology with small, iterative processes and an innovation-first culture, your organization can achieve better outcomes and improved ROI.

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4. Identify Potential Innovation Bottlenecks

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Through continuous integration and delivery best practices — such smaller, more frequent commits and faster feedback — organizations can identify and resolve issues faster and more reliably. Innovation is built through using fast feedback loops and effective prioritization to support new adoptions.

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Teams must be able to collaborate quickly, identify any lag in adoption and prioritize the most important action items and user stories. Together, this creates an agile, innovative environment that can easily adjust to even the most volatile markets.

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If issues arise in any of these three segments, they can cause bottlenecks that stifle innovation. Audit innovation processes and perform a full post-mortem on any disruptive incidents. Through this, your organization will be able to better determine where to make improvements and adjustments. 

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5. Promote Measurable Innovation With CI/CD

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For innovation to yield results, it must be continuously measured. Constant feedback loops, course corrections and thoughtful metrics all combine to create measurable patterns of innovation. 

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Today, organizations are working with hyper-automation processes and quality intelligence systems to improve the measurability and visibility of their systems. Measuring innovation within the CI/CD process begins with identifying the core metrics that define success, such as Google’s DORA metrics:

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• Deployment frequency.
• Lead time for changes.
• Change failure rate.
• Time to restore service.

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Develop a continuous assessment process to identify what is and isn’t working — and to investigate the “why” behind the results.

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Use the Five Steps to Drive the ROI of DevOps Innovation

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Innovation is the fourth step of Copado’s Five Steps to DevOps Success: Visibility, Quality, Speed, Innovation and Resilience. By embracing innovation, your organization can be more agile, more productive and ultimately improve its ROI.