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Q&A: Forrester Talks About Modern Service Delivery

Pete Goldin
Editor and Publisher
APMdigest

In APMdigest's exclusive Q&A, Amy DeMartine, Forrester Senior Analyst serving Infrastructure & Operations Professionals, discusses the modern service delivery cycle and her report: What Makes Modern Service Delivery Modern?

APM: What is the modern service delivery life cycle?

AD: Just as industrialization modernized the production of goods, automation applied to the modern service delivery life cycle can increase the speed and quality of service releases, which you can tailor to the right cadence of your business. Use new and newly repurposed tools to automate the full life cycle.

APM: What advantages does modern service delivery offer?

AD: In the race to differentiate an organization's brand, products, and services, enterprises are not only transforming their software portfolio but also their technology management organization to balance the development and delivery of modern software. While the application development team is transforming its organization to adopt modern application development, I&O organizations are adopting modern service delivery to keep up with this increased agility that is critical to the enterprise competitiveness.

APM: How does I&O need to change to address this?

AD: The life cycle commonly requires both dev and ops to interact with tools across the life cycle. Today's need for speed relies on being able to skip any manual process or finger-pointing and proceed directly to the next phase or troubleshoot a problem. These tools become the foundation for modern service delivery as a single source of truth and trusted enabler of processes. As such, it is important to choose these tools together with development to encourage joint ownership and trust.

APM: Do you foresee I&O and development evolving into a single "DevOps" organization?

AD: No. I think I&O has a role to play in sourcing and managing an abstracted (example cloud) infrastructure that complements development, but still is different enough to support a separate organization, at least for the next 5 to 10 years.

APM: Where does APM fit into this new approach?

AD: APM is still the control and validation of applications in production. Thus it is extremely important as an element of customer experience and satisfaction. It is also a very important feedback to the development group.

ABOUT Amy DeMartine

Amy DeMartine is a member of Forrester's Service Delivery team, which serves Infrastructure & Operations and Service Support and Delivery professionals. Her current research is the strategy, design, organization, and implementation of modern service delivery created through methods such as DevOps and resulting in continuous delivery. DeMartine has more than 20 years of experience in product management, product and technical marketing, development and operations roles driving IT management software products from conception through the product life cycle until obsolescence. Her previous work at BMC and HP included the development of strategic positioning to bring new enterprise software products to worldwide markets as well as expanding the global reach of existing products. She holds a master's degree in Telecommunications and a bachelor's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Colorado.

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Q&A: Forrester Talks About Modern Service Delivery

Pete Goldin
Editor and Publisher
APMdigest

In APMdigest's exclusive Q&A, Amy DeMartine, Forrester Senior Analyst serving Infrastructure & Operations Professionals, discusses the modern service delivery cycle and her report: What Makes Modern Service Delivery Modern?

APM: What is the modern service delivery life cycle?

AD: Just as industrialization modernized the production of goods, automation applied to the modern service delivery life cycle can increase the speed and quality of service releases, which you can tailor to the right cadence of your business. Use new and newly repurposed tools to automate the full life cycle.

APM: What advantages does modern service delivery offer?

AD: In the race to differentiate an organization's brand, products, and services, enterprises are not only transforming their software portfolio but also their technology management organization to balance the development and delivery of modern software. While the application development team is transforming its organization to adopt modern application development, I&O organizations are adopting modern service delivery to keep up with this increased agility that is critical to the enterprise competitiveness.

APM: How does I&O need to change to address this?

AD: The life cycle commonly requires both dev and ops to interact with tools across the life cycle. Today's need for speed relies on being able to skip any manual process or finger-pointing and proceed directly to the next phase or troubleshoot a problem. These tools become the foundation for modern service delivery as a single source of truth and trusted enabler of processes. As such, it is important to choose these tools together with development to encourage joint ownership and trust.

APM: Do you foresee I&O and development evolving into a single "DevOps" organization?

AD: No. I think I&O has a role to play in sourcing and managing an abstracted (example cloud) infrastructure that complements development, but still is different enough to support a separate organization, at least for the next 5 to 10 years.

APM: Where does APM fit into this new approach?

AD: APM is still the control and validation of applications in production. Thus it is extremely important as an element of customer experience and satisfaction. It is also a very important feedback to the development group.

ABOUT Amy DeMartine

Amy DeMartine is a member of Forrester's Service Delivery team, which serves Infrastructure & Operations and Service Support and Delivery professionals. Her current research is the strategy, design, organization, and implementation of modern service delivery created through methods such as DevOps and resulting in continuous delivery. DeMartine has more than 20 years of experience in product management, product and technical marketing, development and operations roles driving IT management software products from conception through the product life cycle until obsolescence. Her previous work at BMC and HP included the development of strategic positioning to bring new enterprise software products to worldwide markets as well as expanding the global reach of existing products. She holds a master's degree in Telecommunications and a bachelor's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Colorado.

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A perfect storm is brewing in cybersecurity — certificate lifespans shrinking to just 47 days while quantum computing threatens today's encryption. Organizations must embrace ephemeral trust and crypto-agility to survive this dual challenge ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 14, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud network observability... 

While companies adopt AI at a record pace, they also face the challenge of finding a smart and scalable way to manage its rapidly growing costs. This requires balancing the massive possibilities inherent in AI with the need to control cloud costs, aim for long-term profitability and optimize spending ...

Telecommunications is expanding at an unprecedented pace ... But progress brings complexity. As WanAware's 2025 Telecom Observability Benchmark Report reveals, many operators are discovering that modernization requires more than physical build outs and CapEx — it also demands the tools and insights to manage, secure, and optimize this fast-growing infrastructure in real time ...

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...