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Q&A: Forrester Talks About Modern Service Delivery

Pete Goldin
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
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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The Latest
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If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...