Enabling customer-centric digital organizations

The pace of change and customer expectations for digital services are driving organizations to transform. The ability to deliver innovative digital services rapidly and with reliable quality requires access to secure, agile, scalable and highly available IT. By tightly integrating IT development, operations and quality functions, DevOps is a key enabler of digital transformation. Along with speed to market, the promise of DevOps includes a paradigm shift in productivity and quality, innovation for competitive advantage, self-directed and engaged teams, better IT performance and greater cost efficiency.

Key challenges

Pursuing DevOps may be a matter of survival at this point, but there have been many failed attempts. Among commonly cited challenges are changing embedded cultures, achieving business-IT alignment, and measuring return on investment. Limitations of legacy environments and keeping up with rapidly changing technology also are noted as obstacles. Additionally, for most organizations, DevOps must be implemented alongside traditional IT delivery methods for the foreseeable future.

Key to overcoming these challenges is ensuring that DevOps programs are:

  • Designed and managed as a principle- and metrics-driven cultural transformation
  • Built upon agile continuous processes and around agile architecture
  • Supported by modern, integrated tool chains and automation

A holistic and balanced approach

CGI’s holistic and balanced DevOps Reference Model provides a blueprint for high-performing IT organizations. It balances the five key dimensions of Governance, Culture, Metrics, Process & Architecture, and Tools.

Using this model, we focus on agile architectures and cloud-based platforms to enable autonomous teams. Our continuous integration model is based on test-driven development that embeds security and quality at every step. Our continuous delivery pipeline accelerates deployment to production and reduces risk of failure. We deploy monitoring and automated remediation to reduce downtime and cost of operations. We also verify the benefits of DevOps through metrics and real-time analytics to quantify the ROI of the transformation.