We are used to the concept of ALM (Application Lifecycle Management). However, now we see a lot of changes and new ways of working are evolving like DevSecOps, SRE, VSM, etc., to deliver better Value to the Customers, Business, Employees and Partners. ALM made us to think holistically to some extent from the end-to-end development perspective. However, now we need to expand to Production. The whole CI/CD pipeline actually extends to Customers and are not limited to the edges of our own environment.
Today’s Digital Transformation is about continually optimizing value delivery. Security is also a critical aspect and hence DevSecOps is bringing the set of practices and approach that combines, Software Development, IT Operation, Security, Cloud Services with one common shared objective of delivering Value. It is about Continuous Improvement, Continuous Learning and Continuous Innovation.
We need to scale this scenario across the Enterprise. This is where Value Stream Management (VSM) plays an important role. This is a change in the mindset to make every decision from the perspective of how it contributes to value creation and how does it impact the entire Value Stream.
This approach helps in improving Flow and thus decrease time to value and removes waste in the Value Stream. We take a Data-driven approach. The visibility is important to take decisions and thus we need to bring in the Observability of the entire Value Stream. This is a critical gap that is present in current day approaches organizations take in their siloed organization structure, siloed by tools and siloed by frameworks. Data driven decisions on future investment is important and needs to be looked from the Portfolio Management perspective. Portfolio Management is about managing organization investment to deliver value to the business by aligning the spend to strategic outcomes.
As we need to create Resilience with the end customer in mind, we need to look holistically. As Gartner puts it, we have the Value Stream Delivery Platform, which is our end-to-end pipeline and the Value Stream Management Platform.
We need the Value Stream Management Platform, example, a tool from Planview. This will provide the overall visibility and help in building the resilience from the Operations perspective and the Security perspective, thus ensuring we eliminate maximum outage possible, thus giving the best to our Customers, Business, Employees and Partners. The recent Digital Operational Resilience Act by Europe is also having the same objective.
The next important aspect is Sustainability. The recent WEF meeting held in Davos, has stirred up the need to focus on Sustainability. We need to look at how IT enables Sustainability and how we practice Sustainable IT.
We can extend collection of Sustainability related information to bring in the aspect of DevSusOps, as coined by Adrian Cockcroft. Simon and Mason propped a method called Sustainable Value Stream Mapping (SVSM) as a means to enhancing sustainability in product manufacturing by analyzing emissions of the GHG, CO2, in addition to the time.
Every business process today uses IT. We can look at the entire Value Stream Delivery Platform, add the Sustainability related data collection and report the ESG related reporting in the Value Stream Management. This will help in providing Enablement of Sustainability through IT.
We can extend the same concept to the IT Value Stream bring in the Sustainable IT aspect. This in turn helps in building better resilience, reducing cost and improving capacity. Portfolio Rationalization, Data Management, Re-factoring to make loosely coupled architecture, using new technology like Cloud-native and microservices are examples of aspects to be looked at for practicing Sustainable IT.
A platform integrating Observability, Value Stream Management, Application Security Orchestration and Collaboration Tool with the CI/CD pipeline and Infrastructure as Code is the holistic solution to build the two critical pillars of Resilience and Sustainability which are the top priority in every CIO and CEO’s mind today.
Author: Dr. Niladri Choudhuri