[December 22, 2014]

IDC MaturityScape Benchmark Assesses DevOps in the United States

International Data Corporation (IDC) today announced a new report, IDC MaturityScape Benchmark: DevOps in the United States (Doc #252719). The new report presents the results of IDC's (News - Alert) 2014 DevOps MaturityScape Benchmark Survey and is a supplement to IDC MaturityScape: DevOps (Doc #249471). Together, they provide a comprehensive overview of the IDC MaturityScape model for DevOps, which is designed to help organizations assess their DevOps maturity level against industry benchmarks. IDC believes that DevOps will be adopted (in either practice or discipline) by 80% of Global 1000 organizations by 2019.

• ClicktoTweet: @IDC #IDCMaturityScapeBenchmark - growing number of #Enterprise #ITOrganizations are Adopting #DevOps Practices

DevOps offers IT organizations a tremendous opportunity to transform how companies develop, deploy, and manage IT services. According to Stephen Elliot, Research Vice President of IDC's IT Infrastructure and Cloud practice, DevOps "One of the most revealing aspects of this benchmark research is that a growing number of IT organizations are using new automation and performance management tools across both the development and operations teams, and linking these projects through DevOps practices. These organizations are delivering business value in the form of cost avoidance, while increasing the speed and quality of their customer impactful services."

The biggest challenge, according to the report, is getting started and selecting which project to start with. Many starting points include automated testing, continuous delivery or integration, application performance management, application performance and analytics, or automated change and configuration management projects.

Key findings from the new research include:

• For most large IT organizations, DevOps impact has been seen through process standardization, and there is an increased focus on teamwork across development and operations teams. However, organizations are taking various approaches to breaking down silos and bringing cross-functional SMEs together.
• Often, IT's culture is the biggest DevOps adoption barrier that can demotivate projects. Organizations need to put more effort into creating an IT culture of collaboration, teamwork, sharing, empathy, communication, trust, quality, and the need for measurement/metrics to achieve long-term improvement.
• Organizations deploying 3rd Platform solutions in DevOps profit by driving tighter collaboration across business stakeholders and development, test deployment, application support, and operations teams.

• Many organizations are still at the opportunistic stage for all five dimensions of DevOps maturity, with a minimal number of organizations at the ad hoc stage. Overall, DevOps capabilities are consistent across the people, technology, and process dimensions.
• Less than one-tenth (9.2%) of the respondents are at the optimized stage in the culture dimension, while more than twice that many (20.2%) are at the optimized stage in the business dimension. Most IT organizations today have a better understanding and acceptance of the requirements and needs to achieve a desired state for business alignment, strategy execution, and budgeting than the relentless courage and risks required to drive cultural change.
• Cultural transformation is at the heart of DevOps practices and a core impact point for achieving DevOps success. This disparity is also reflected in over half (53.7%) of respondents indicating that they are at the opportunistic stage in the culture dimension, while the counterpart percentage for the business dimension is 41.7%. These results show that organizations should put more effort into creating an IT culture of collaboration, teamwork, sharing, empathy, communication, trust, quality, and the need for measurement/metrics.

For IT leadership and their teams, recognizing their DevOps maturity level is essential to enabling them to understand what the IT organization is capable of delivering, knowing what maturity level is required to achieve target business objectives, and identifying the next steps to closing that maturity gap. Based on the findings in this study, IDC recommends:

• Organizations prioritize initiatives and investments with DevOps practices to improve value creation and business outcomes through well-defined technology and business metrics.
• Organizations incorporate cultural considerations into their DevOps discipline. IT leaders across silos must work together to build a better IT culture, and utilize their existing cultural values, to help accelerate the use of DevOps in areas such as collaboration, metrics and measurement, trust, and empathy.
• To create a sustainable competitive advantage for their business organizations from DevOps practices, executive management teams should remove any risks, be open to failures, and undertake the DevOps journey to improve their maturity from opportunistic to higher maturity stages.

"Rather than just use DevOps technologies, companies need to structure themselves around DevOps to impact the customer experience and optimize tools, budgets, staff, and processes," Elliot noted. "This maturity benchmark report, together with the IDC MaturityScape DevOps framework, will guide IT and business organizations to drive business results through the transformation of application delivery and operations."

To learn more about IDC MaturityScape Benchmarks, please contact IDC at [email protected].

For additional information about this report or to arrange a one-on-one briefing with Stephen Elliot, please contact Sarah Murray at 781-378-2674 or [email protected]. Reports are available to qualified members of the media. For information on purchasing reports, contact [email protected]; reporters should email [email protected].

About IDC MaturityScape Benchmarks

IDC MaturityScape Benchmarks aid in the discussion of IT strategy and technology investments by helping IT executives and their enterprise partners to gauge where their enterprise is in relation to that of their peers and competitors, best achievers, and the least invested. By utilizing IDC benchmark data, IDC MaturityScape Benchmarks enable organizations to compare maturity against peers, pinpoint which dimensions of an initiative peer organizations are more mature in, and identify the benefits organizations achieve as they move to more mature stages.

About IDC

International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community to make fact-based decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,000 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries. In 2014, IDC celebrates its 50th anniversary of providing strategic insights to help clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media, research, and events company. You can learn more about IDC by visiting www.idc.com. Follow IDC on Twitter (News - Alert) at @IDC.

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