Destructing CALMS approach to IT Culture - Secret of Transformation

The culture of an organization is crucial before jumping into automation. Automation is a noble goal, but should go in hand to solving the cultural aspects of your business. The development team and the operations team must change their way of operations for DevSecOps to be implemented. Companies need to embrace change or perish. But what’s the best way overcome the barriers to transformation?

Barriers to Change

You can plan the ends and the means, but you can’t always choose the obstacles you have to overcome. Typically, companies face some combination of these problems:

• No culture of innovation: Look at what gets rewards. Usually, it is efficient execution of existing processes, not the development of new ones.

• Challenges around collaboration: This is especially true for global businesses. How do you bring people together if they work on different continents?

• Industrial-age static work processes: Paper forms, multiple layers of approval, slow decision-making, and centralized or hierarchical management structures all make it harder to move fast.

• Inappropriate working environments: Application leaders and developers are looking to receive real-time technical and industry information and develop a culture of innovation that motivates and rewards end-user feedback. Business, marketing and IT function should interact as one team: Mature organizations ensure that their release planning is carried out as a joint exercise with all their internal stakeholders.

Organizations today are under tremendous pressure from executive management and customers to deliver a higher quality of products and services at lower costs, and to do so using existing resources. Any expenditure companies do make to help them achieve this goal is expected to deliver a measurable, hard-dollar ROI – and to deliver it quickly. ROI has traditionally translated to “reduce costs.” However, cost is just one piece of the ROI equation. Today’s market leaders understand that ROI is multidimensional and that, in many cases, the cost-savings component can be secondary to other returns, such as improving customer satisfaction, brand differentiation, and the collection of accurate data, all of which can also drive increased revenues.

At its root, DevSecOps is a cultural movement; it’s all about people. An organization may adopt the most efficient processes or automated tools possible, but they’re useless without the people who eventually must execute those processes and use those tools. A DevSecOps culture is characterized by a high degree of collaboration across roles, focus on business instead of departmental objectives, trust, and high value placed on learning through experimentation. Building a culture isn’t like adopting a process or a tool. It requires (for lack of a better term) social engineering of teams of people, each with unique predispositions, experiences, and biases. This diversity can make culture-building challenging and difficult. Talent is critical to driving DevSecOps success across an organization. People that understand the importance of a culture shift and the process updates across domains, including the business, will be mandatory to see positive results and to communicate wins early with DevSecOps