Servicedesk and IT Support Show, London 2017 Audio from the presentation: https://soundcloud.com/diversifieduk/sits-2017-is-devops-really-changing-it-support-jon-hall-bmc

1. © Copyright 2017 BMC Software, Inc.
Is DevOps Really Changing IT Support?
Jon Hall
Principal Product Manager, BMC Remedy ITSM
Servicedesk and IT Support Show, London 2017

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@JonHall_
Enterprises are transforming around software
30% digital sales 80% digital sales

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@JonHall_
Case study: Global travel company
• 1000+ applications
• 5,500 employees
• 3000 developers! (many are contractors)
• One servicedesk

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“10+ Deploys per Day: Dev and
Ops Cooperation at Flickr”
First DevOpsDays event
(Ghent, Belgium).
Publication of
“The Phoenix Project”
“The Lean Startup”
“Continuous Delivery”First USA DevOpsDays
20102009 20132008 2012 2014
Significant enterprise
adoptions
Brief history of DevOps – some key events
Patrick Debois and Andrew
Shafer form Agile Systems
Administration Group
“Ops, DevOps and PaaS
(No-Ops) at Netflix”

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@JonHall_
DevOps is going mainstream
DevOps Enterprise Summit speakers, 5th-6th May 2017, London

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DevOps Outcomes: ITSM under pressure?
Deployment frequency:
Change lead time:
Mean time to recover:
Change failure rate:
46% better
440x faster
96x faster
5x lower

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Enterprises are different
Software:
Customers:
Infrastructure:
Cadence:
Open source, cloud.
Emergent or transformed markets
Software defined & public cloud
Multiple daily releases.
Legacy on-premise + New cloud tools
Established consumer and B2B markets
On-premise, cloud transitioning.
Improving from traditional long cycles

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“The enterprise space doesn’t move
slowly because they’re stupid, or
they hate technology.
It’s because they have users.”
—Luke Kanies, Founder, Puppet. Configuration Management Camp 2015, Belgium.
…and in particular…

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DevOps adoption in established enterprises
“Startup-like”
teams formed.
New products,
Ad-hoc support.
Enterprise ITSM “adopts”
frontline support.

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Case Study: HP Laserjet Firmware team
10% code integration
20% detailed planning
25% porting code
25% supporting current product
15% manual testing
5% remaining innovation capacity
2% continuous integration
5% agile planning
15% one main branch
10% customer equipment branch
5% testing (most automated)
~40% capacity for innovation
20112008
(A well-cited example of enterprise DevOps transformation)

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• Merged 24 codelines into a single build.
• Highly automated testing, including physical simulations
• “Stop the line” if anyone breaks the build or the test suite.
• 400-800 worldwide developers... “Remote Agile” via ChatOps
Case Study: HP Laserjet Firmware transformation

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@JonHall_
Case Study: HP Laserjet Firmware transformation
• Support was fully merged into the
development process, on the same code-line.
• Prioritization is handled by a marketing lead
• Hence Support “tickets” are effectively
managed completely in SDLC tools
• Customer context is key.

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Case Study: A national mapping agency
Development Operations
Before DevOps transformation:
Application1 Application2
Support

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Development
Operations
Team Leader
Support Specialist
Application1 Application2
Case Study: A national mapping agency
After DevOps Transformation:

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Application1
Case Study: A national mapping agency
Identity
Manager Remedy
• New application teams.
• User assignment to teams.
• Inter-team moves.
• Roles within teams
(e.g. “incident manager”).
• Foundation data updates
• Autonomy: Team leaders juggle the teams
• Some roles remain outside DevOps teams – e.g.
Problem Mangement

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DevOps challenges ITSM orthodoxies
• “Incident Management” looks different
• Change Management struggling to show value.
• Release Management increasingly automated
• Cloud and Software Defined Infrastructure dominate.
• “Traditional” ITAM and CMDB less relevant.

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Servicedesk challenges
• Application services suddenly appear
• No visibility of issues transferred to developers
• Lack of knowledge sharing
• New kinds of customer, especially external

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Change Manager challenges
• Accountability but lack of visibility
• Some processes adapt poorly to DevOps. e.g. CAB
• Reduced currency to assert role

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But... Enterprise reality challenges DevOps!
• Customer/business context of incoming issues and bugs.
• Adaptation to life ”on call”
• What to prioritise? Fix bugs or build new stuff?
• How to process alerts, particularly if noisy/low-quality.

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“IT organizations that have tried to custom-
adjust current tools to meet DevOps
practices have a failure rate of 80%”
We need a rethink
DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified (IDC, 2014)

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• Work-in-progress queues
• Asynchronous communication
• Single role teams
• Individual over-exposure
• Poor knowledge transfer
How to annoy a DevOps advocate

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LEVEL 2 SUPPORT LEVEL 2 SUPPORTLEVEL 2 SUPPORT
LEVEL 3 SPECIALISTS LEVEL 3 SPECIALISTS LEVEL 3 SPECIALISTS LEVEL 3 SPECIALISTS
LEVEL 1 SUPPORT
Classic “Tiered” Support Structure

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LEVEL 2 SUPPORT LEVEL 2 SUPPORTLEVEL 2 SUPPORT
LEVEL 3 SPECIALISTS LEVEL 3 SPECIALISTS LEVEL 3 SPECIALISTS LEVEL 3 SPECIALISTS
LEVEL 1 SUPPORT
Escalation
Escalation
Classic “Tiered” Support Structure

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LEVEL 2 SUPPORT LEVEL 2 SUPPORTLEVEL 2 SUPPORT
LEVEL 3 SPECIALISTS LEVEL 3 SPECIALISTS LEVEL 3 SPECIALISTS LEVEL 3 SPECIALISTS
LEVEL 1 SUPPORT
…when the answer is here… …or here.
Issues may spend time here

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@JonHall_
LEVEL 1 SUPPORT
LEVEL 2 SUPPORT
LEVEL 3 SPECIALISTS
When tickets
eventually escalate…
…they frequently
bounce back for
clarification

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@JonHall_
LEVEL 1 SUPPORT
LEVEL 2 SUPPORT
LEVEL 3 SPECIALISTS
LEVEL 1 SUPPORT
LEVEL 3 SPECIALISTS
LEVEL 2 SUPPORT
SUBJECT MATTER EXPERT
The system encourages “heroes” (not in a good way)

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Swarming – much better aligned to DevOps
Specialist Product Teams
Severity 1 Swarm
Dispatch Swarm
Prioritise
Backlog Swarm Backlog Swarm

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• Autonomy (guidelines, not rules)
• Knowledge transfer and skills development
• ChatOps
• Reduces Work-in-Progress accumulation
• Protects individuals from burnout
Swarming – much better aligned to DevOps

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“At every step of the workflow, we have to
go into the ITSM tool and click something”
“Really I want to work with chat, our
source control system, and email"
Tooling challenges

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ChatOps!

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32. © Copyright 2017 BMC Software, Inc.
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DevOps teams want to use the CMDB
“Drifts, timelines”
“The person who is on call at
4am needs to know who has
been doing what” “Context is a trigger word for me...
in a company of 4000 people,
things can get out of hand really
fast if you don't have context”
“What is actually
running on an
environment?”
“If you're dropped in the
middle of something,
how did you get here?"
(but not through the actual interface!)

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@JonHall_
• Customer and business context
• Service at scale
• Impact analysis and triage
• Knowledge Management
• CMDB
• Etc…
ITSM can bring significant value…

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@JonHall_
• Learn from DevOps acheivements
• Observe and understand the culture
• Understand where value is added and where it isn’t
• Bring that value to DevOps teams’ tools… API all the things!
• Alignment, not handoff.
…but we need to adapt

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@JonHall_
Recommended resources
medium.com/@jonhall