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.