Understanding IT Infrastructure and DevOps as a company's differentiating capabilities

What lays at the heart of most companies' operating capabilities? Of course, information technology (IT) infrastructure! Companies with more complex operational characteristics rely on new bleeding edge technologies in their IT infrastructure. Effective infrastructure enables business' capabilities, ineffective - destroys them. The deepest challenges in the IT infrastructure management is bridging the decision making between business and technology domain.

If company's core business is in technology, and in particularly in software technology, then there is another very important component of bridging IT with business. It is so called DevOps.  DevOps is a combination of words "development" and "operations". According to Wikipedia it means a "software development method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information technology (IT) operations professionals". For business it means enabling business agility and aligning with IT infrastructure.

For business to be competitive it needs ability to implement changes or innovations very fast. A life-cycle from the development to operation can use different project management methods.  Latest trends in the project management methodologies are agile frameworks.  Even these approaches are faster and more adaptive than waterfall, sometimes they are not fast enough for a business. So, DevOps helps making agile development to be more agile and prevents from  elevating of risks of premature pushing to operations. DevOps solutions comes from shifting company culture towards measuring performance, unifying processes and tools.DevOps tools are a big part of the concept. The buzz words are “infrastructure as code”, “model driven automation”, and “continuous deployment”. Choice of right tools and their implementation eliminates a lot of manual work and foster automation.

As a result their adoption makes a big difference in improving company's agility. Speed of implementing changes that enable new business capabilities comes from the contemporary IT infrastructure and DevOps. Ability of a company to recognize this fact and adopt, invest accordingly is a game changer.