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Digitalagility–
thekeytoinnovation
inthedigitalage
Empowering business
for what’s next
Tableof
contents
03
What does digital
agility mean for
today’s businesses?
04
Why is digital
agility crucial?
07
How do you realize
the value of digital
agility?
09
What has Microsoft
learned through its own
digital transformation?
13
Next steps – initiating
your Digital Agility
journey
DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE
What does digital agility
mean for today’s businesses?
In today’s business environment, time to market is crucial. Most companies recognize this and
have altered their business practices to prioritize speed as technology continues to play an
increasing role in determining business outcomes. Yet when speed comes at the expense of
quality, will this truly help your company stand out?
Realistically, the answer is no. Companies often try to institute agility to deliver increasing
business value at speed. However, without building for quality at the same time, products may
be delivered faster, but often with more deficiencies causing increased downtime, customer
complaints, and ultimately failure. To achieve successful business outcomes as demonstrated
by organizations such as Netflix or Toyota, instituting DevOps and building digital agility into
your organization is crucial. Without doing so, you run the risk of your competitors
outmaneuvering your organization to deliver what your customers want.
What is digital agility?
Digital agility is the business conversation about how to adopt DevOps and agile practices to
sense, anticipate, and respond to what the market needs. The aim is to exceed customer
expectations with agile operations and development. Developing this agility starts with
transforming your IT processes, but can also include parallel technology updates and further
cultural changes. A successful digital transformation builds a cloud-enabled organization that
delivers quality software rapidly and with regularity.
“With DevOps and Azure, we’re able to reduce
our new-feature release cycle down to one week,
and we think we can even speed that up.
“Fikri Larguet
Director of Cloud Services, Geico¹
1 https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/geico
What happens if you fail to adopt digitally agile practices?
One classic example of businesses that failed to adopt digital agility can be found in shuttered
storefronts across the world. Large, once proud buildings, at one time packed with customers, now
lie empty. Above some of these empty storefronts the words “Video Rental” are emblazoned. Ten
years ago, many video rental shops were central to the entertainment of their local community—
with thousands of stores across the world, they were a place anybody could stop in and browse a
variety of options for inexpensive entertainment. Today, video stores have gone the way of the
dinosaurs. Streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, or dTV (Japan) are the default way customers
receive content, rather than physically going to a storefront.
Most video stores knew this change was coming. They knew they had to become digitally agile, but
couldn’t complete their digital transformation at the speed they needed to. In the US, a prevalent
example is Blockbusters: they began hemorrhaging money and the company was forced to sell off
thousands of storefronts.
Blockbuster stores
YEAR
NUMBER
OF
STORES
2004
9000
2011
2400
2018
1
This sort of story is all too common among companies that have failed to build for a digitally agile
future. When industries change, it often happens seemingly overnight. Without digital tools and
business agility, traditional businesses are hard pressed to keep up with their more prepared
competitors. Will your company survive without becoming digitally agile?
03
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/09/business/09blockbuster.html
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/07/12/soon-there-only-one-blockbuster-video-store-left-u-s/781653002/
DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
Why is digital agility
crucial?
Technology is increasingly driving every facet of global business. Organizations that have
succeeded at digital transformation are disrupting and defeating their slower, less agile
competitors. Your ultimate business goal is to deliver value to your customers, and digital
agility will empower you to ship quality software faster, therefore enabling you to deliver
more value.
Successfully implementing digital agility promises to achieve key business goals
such as:
1.	 Improving customer experience by delivering applications in short, rapid cycles,
leveraging the power of digital customer feedback loops.
2.	 Moving from ideation to production faster and enabling experimentation thanks to
more frequent deployments and lower change failure rates.
3.	 Exceeding commercial and non-commercial goals such as improving profitability,
market share, and productivity. (According to the 2018 “Accelerate: State of DevOps”
report based on responses from more than 20,000 technology professionals
worldwide, elite DevOps performers are 1.53 times more likely to exceed goals for
organizational performance.)
Comparing elite DevOps performers against low performers, we find that elite performers have...
How does DevOps drive digital agility?
If the goal state of digital agility is the “what”, DevOps is a large part of the “how”. DevOps seeks to
enable continuous delivery of value to end users through the union of people, process, and products.
The word “DevOps” itself is symbolic of the multiple disciplines that are part of this digitally agile
team—replacing siloed Development and Operations groups with a unified one designed to share
practices and tools, with employees working in tandem on the same teams. Certain DevOps practices
are especially crucial to the successful development of digital agility within your organization, and we
will define a few below.
04
Source: DORA’s Accelerate: State of DevOps 2018
DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Agile planning
The agile approach to software development emphasizes incremental delivery, collaborative
teams, and continual planning and learning versus front-loaded (pre-project) planning. By
employing an agile mindset, organizations drive better software development and set
themselves up to implement DevOps practices. This means responding to change instead of
sticking to a pre-defined plan, collaborating with customers to ensure prioritization of their
actual versus imagined needs, valuing working software over documentation, and prioritizing
individuals and interactions instead of bogging down in processes and tools. We’ve doubtless
heard variations of this throughout the years, but the results are clear—agile implementation
results in better software delivered in a shorter time frame than other methodologies.
While adopting certain agile techniques does not in itself move you all the way to a digitally
agile state, it is a crucial part of the puzzle. Despite misconceptions, agile methodology does
not lack rigor or planning. Rather, agile is about continual planning throughout the project,
and planning for changes with a willingness to adapt as needed. This is part of the reason why
Microsoft specifies agile planning as a key part of DevOps, versus agile delivery or an agile
framework. By establishing this agility in the culture of your organization, you will plan
effectively throughout a project’s lifecycle, leading to improved collaboration, continual
planning and learning, and increased frequency of shipping high quality software—all of
which can put you ahead of your competitors.
Continuous integration
Another important feature of DevOps is continuous integration (CI). CI is a process that is
designed to encourage developers to share their code and work together by automating the
code building and testing process each time a developer makes changes. All changes are
automatically merged into a shared version control repository after the completion of each
small task. Version control is designed to maintain multiple layers, or versions, of built code to
facilitate easy isolation and fixing of bugs. Whenever a team member “commits” code to the
repository, an automated system builds, tests, and validates the trunk or “master branch” of
the code.
Since software developers often work in isolation, CI encourages them to integrate their code
into the overall code base regularly instead of waiting weeks to merge code. This helps to
avoid conflicts and duplicated efforts, keeps team strategies aligned, and cuts down on
hard-to-fix bugs by catching them when they occur rather than farther down the line. When
bugs are caught early in the development cycle, they’re much easier and significantly less
expensive to fix. CI provides a crucial boost to build quality, while also ensuring team
interactivity on projects where developers may try to work in isolation counter to the
collaborative teams that form the core of DevOps and digital agility.
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
Continuous delivery
Continuous delivery (CD) is a lean practice that focuses on keeping production fresh and minimizing
time to deploy, one of our key performance indicators (KPIs). By using version control and automation,
CD can minimize the time it takes to deploy new software and the time it takes to mitigate production
issues. This eliminates idle time and delivers more value, with greater frequency. This process has
become mandatory for many organizations, so they can deliver value to end users continually and
without errors. Continuous integration enables the CD process and creates the regulatory structure
that cuts down on errors and production time.
Under previous models, application and operations teams found it all too common for software
release cycles to be bogged down. Without automated builds and integration in a version-controlled
environment, software releases were often unreliable and prone to errors or delays. By using this
modern release pipeline, development teams can quickly deploy new features with more confidence
in their reliability. Mistakes found in production are caught quickly and fixed. By combining
continuous integration with continuous delivery, the business creates a continuous stream of
customer value.
Application monitoring
Effective monitoring is critical in DevOps because it enables continuous improvement. It
increases customer satisfaction, acquisition, and retention by continually providing feedback on
an application’s performance and usage patterns. This information is crucial to how and what the
development team builds and allows them to deliver what customers need at speed. Effective
monitoring doubles as a “test in production” so that teams are receiving a continual flow of key
customer data and can spot and mitigate production incidents promptly. This monitoring element
combines with the continuous deployment pipeline to enable quick and painless action on any
changes that need to be made post-release.
Another key feature of effective monitoring is continuous learning and validation by collecting
telemetry on usage. This concept views each new deployment of software as an opportunity to track
data and support or diminish the hypotheses that led to the deployment in the first place. By tracking
usage differences between versions, teams can measure the impact they are having and use that
telemetry to drive future business decisions. This is an important way to build in customer
responsiveness and allows teams to make data-informed decisions to fail fast or pivot.
05
DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
Automation
Enabled by dynamically scaled cloud capabilities, automation is crucial to achieving digital
agility and to adopting DevOps practices. Without automation, it is impossible to use
policies such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, and application monitoring at
scale. Automation is one of the core practices of digital agility because it enables teams to
focus on the most important decisions and work, while also building in layers of monitoring
and protection in the process.
A great example of this can be seen in HP LaserJet’s printer business. During their digital
transformation they built a continuous improvement initiative and invested in automation,
including a focus on automating testing. Thanks to this, they were able to cut down on
other tasks and increase the time their teams spend on developing new features by 700
percent.⁴
How has the cloud enabled digital agility?
There is a reason that we specifically call out digital agility. Before the cloud, agile practices
were in place at many organizations, however cloud integration is necessary to reach the
full potential of these practices. Cloud-
only analytics streams and automation
workloads bring to the forefront concepts
such as continuous integration and
continuous delivery across teams. With
an increased opportunity to collaborate,
more adept and agile tools, and new
automation and analytics opportunities,
agile practices are coming to fruition in
the cloud. By using public cloud services,
businesses can innovate, save money, and
build agility while retaining control
through flexible service delivery and
operations capability.
TEAMS THAT ADOPT ESSENTIAL
CLOUD CHARACTERISTICS ARE
23 TIMES
MORE LIKELY TO BE ELITE
PERFORMERS.
Source: 2018 “Accelerate: State of DevOps”,
Strategies for a New Economy
4 itrevolution.com/the-amazing-devops-transformation-of-thehp-laserjet-firmware-team-gary-gruver
What are the key agility practices to employ?
There are myriad opportunities to improve and build agility in your organization, but some practices
are particularly important:
Automation first: Whenever automation can be used to free up your team and ensure quality,
it should be used.
Production first: Get features into production and get real feedback instead of forcing
perfection.
Collaboration along with team autonomy: Give teams the opportunity to set goals and
encourage collaboration through use of technology and processes.
Customer focus: Always be customer-focused and track customer feedback and telemetry.
Flexible infrastructure: Infrastructure should enable your team to be flexible and successful,
not bog you down with tiresome processes.
Quality: Ensure quality by using processes such as continuous integration and automated
testing.
06
DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE
How do you realize the
value of digital agility?
It is important to remember that digital agility isn’t a magic wand you can wave to fix
problems overnight. It is crucial to remember that digital agility is a step-by-step journey to
realize the full promise of the cloud through DevOps practices that enable you to
continuously deliver quality software.
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
Why do so many companies’ digital transformations
fail?
Many companies have tried to transform digitally and many of them have failed to achieve a truly
agile state. There is good reason for this—building a digitally nimble state is challenging. Agility is
nearly impossible to achieve from a top down or bottom up approach.
Instead, a successful transformation takes buy-in from business leaders, management, and the
employee community that will be using agile practices. Without ongoing engagement with business
managers and users through a continuous stream of new or altered software, agile practices don’t
work. Truly, without the technological capabilities unlocked by cloud transformation, agility on its own
only goes so far. For most companies, this change requires a significant shift left (building for quality)
in infrastructure, team operations, and other areas such as business governance. To properly
transform, companies must make parallel transformations in both technology and agility. Otherwise,
company culture and the internal politics of the company will derail a successful transformation.
Without paying attention to cultural, political, and strategic concerns along with the standard
budgetary and technology concerns, it is extremely difficult to create successful change.
You need to ask yourself:
•	 How is my company addressing potential conflicts that could derail our transformation?
•	 What can we do to prepare ourselves to successfully implement digital agility?
•	 What can we do to break down the siloed walls between teams without causing conflict?
•	 Why are some of our competitors finding success with digital agility?
07
Source: DORA’s Accelerate: State of DevOps 2018
DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
Why is constant learning so important for
digital agility and company success?
We are not perfect. This belief should be at the core of every digital transformation and it
should lead to perhaps the most important facet of digital transformation: continual
learning. By learning from telemetry, having regular team learning discussions, sharing best
practices, and using processes and tools to encourage people to learn and adapt, our goal
is to continually improve our processes and tools. The more effectively we learn, the more
value we can deliver to our customers.
Some of the most important data to collect to enable learning falls into four KPIs:
1.	 Lead time: the time from the start of a development cycle to deployment, a key
efficiency measure of the development process
2.	 Deployment frequency: the measure of how often software is being delivered, perhaps
our most crucial goal to deliver customer value
3.	 Mean time to restore (MTTR): tracks how long it takes to recover from a failure in
production
4.	 Change fail percentage: the rate of failure in deployment, which limits the value of the
rapid, frequent deployments needed to realize the promise of digital agility
These key findings, and others, enable the constant learning function that is at the core of
digital agility’s iterative process. High-performing organizations consistently excel on these
four indicators. In 2017, high performers saw an MTTR of less than one hour versus the 1 to 7
days of their low performing counterparts, a change failure rate of less than 15% versus
competitors’ 31 to 45%, and consistently better overall returns.⁵
5 Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology
Organizations, 2017
“Instead of telling people to wait for six months for a
new feature, we can give it to them in a few weeks. Our
lead cycles are getting much shorter, and we have
business stakeholders involved so that our solutions
are more aligned with business requirements.
“Johan Krebbers
IT Chief Technology Officer, Royal Dutch Shell⁶
6 https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/top-oil-gas-firm-accelerates-software-development-to-fuel-global-energy-
production
08
DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
What has Microsoft learned
through its own digital
transformation?
Before we even began to help other organizations with their digital transformations, we
learned a lot at Microsoft through our own digital transformation. The key learnings can be
broken down into five critical habits of DevOps, many of which were developed through the
digital agility transformation of the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)⁷ , a service
shared with both our internal teams and our customers:
7 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/devops-at-microsoft/moving-cloud-cadence
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
Customer focus
Being customer-focused has several key facets. Here are the tenets we follow:
1.	 Actively listen to your customers: Use a variety of tools to capture the voice of the customer and
seek out their feedback.
2.	 Collect application telemetry: Utilize native cloud services like Microsoft Azure Application
Insights and its powerful search and query analytics tools.
3.	 Identify and measure KPIs which are important for customers: Track engineering process
velocity with the data collected through telemetry and build tracking. Focus on tracking the
things most important to customers, such as cycle times to release a feature or fix an issue. Feed
this data into a dashboard that keeps key stakeholders and teams informed.
4.	 Develop customer-focused hypotheses to maximize learning and value: Start software
builds from the hypothesis that X customer wants Y product because it delivers Z value. Then
build, measure, and learn to validate the hypothesis. By proving, disproving, or noting as
inconclusive, you can maximize learning and work to deliver more value to customers.
5.	 Fine-tune customer experience with feature flags: Ship features every 3 weeks and bug-fixes
one or more times a day as necessary. Use feature flags (if-else statements) to progressively
expose, activate, or disable features that are in production for everyone or for selected users.
09
DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Production-first mindset
Another key habit is a production-first mindset. To achieve this mindset, you need:
1.	 Live site incidents (LSI): Applications running in production are constantly monitored,
and when problems are detected or reported, an incident response team for the
application is contacted. If needed, the on-call disaster response incident (DRI) team
for the application is contacted. The DRI team will often have both the Dev and Ops
on-call team for the application notified. Data is gathered to identify the root cause
of the issue, and a mitigation developed and released to production through the
release pipeline.
2.	 Be transparent: It is crucial to document all live site issues, their root causes, and
solutions. That data needs to be made available to customers, so they can see what
occurred that impacted them. By providing this information, you develop a stronger
customer connection.
3.	 Alerting is the key to fast detection: In an ideal state, every alert should be
actionable and represent a real issue with the application. Work to have zero
false alerts and activate alert auto-notification of DRIs.
4.	 Completely automate all deployments: The power of automation to enable digital
agility is essential—every infrastructure and application change is checked into source
control to ensure that no one-time commands are run manually. This allows you to
regulate and track all deployments.
5.	 Track deployments in production: Every deployment is tracked and monitored in the
release-management tool. By using a ringed deployment model, you can detect issues
as they occur, making them easier to resolve.
6.	 Employ circuit breakers to limit impact: Design your application so you can manage
for failure such as service dependency failure, latency tolerance, and fault tolerance
logic.
7.	 Security mindset: Bring people in to perform penetration testing of your application
and systems. You should also embed automated security testing as part of the CI/CD
pipeline. Be proactive in learning and sharing the lessons learned.
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Team autonomy and enterprise alignment
To build team autonomy and cultural enterprise alignment, focus on three key indicators:
People: Developers and Operations should work together as one DevOps team.
Process: All processes through the complete lifecycle should be performed by the
DevOps team.
Tools: The team should be responsible for the complete stack—from infrastructure
to application to data.
While focusing on these pieces to build team autonomy, you also need to consider alignment with the
overall culture of the enterprise. This means shifting roles and accountability to match agile functions,
driving planning through continual learning informed by customer feedback and usage telemetry,
and increasing communication among and across teams. It also means removing siloes and
decentralizing current risk management practices. By also building in team autonomy within the
larger organization—and allowing the agile team to function properly and “fail fast” through
incremental implementation and delivery—your organization can get the most out of your agile
teams. While it’s recommended for organizations to use agile methodology across the enterprise to
achieve best results, this understandably isn’t always feasible. You can instill digital agility in key facets
of the enterprise by giving teams the cultural abilities and autonomy necessary to achieve success
through agile methodologies.
“By bringing together our departments instead
of keeping them siloed, we could better use all
the capabilities available to us and gain speed.
Microsoft Services helped us to achieve that.
“Erik Jongsma
Product Owner, Rabobank⁸
8 http://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/rabobank
10
DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Shift left quality
The fourth key habit dives into technical terminology, but in the end its all about building
for quality:
Bug cap: Bug cap is an important metric allowing a set number of defects per engineer. If
engineers go above the bug cap, they are unable to work on any features in the current or
next work sprint until the team pays down their “defect debt”. Practices such as the bug
cap help to ensure quality builds and force engineers to maintain interest in continuous
integration.
Shift left from integration to unit tests: Over time, pivot to simple tests that anyone can
run at any time in the process—even in production. This allows tests to be fast and effective,
so that they can be run continuously and increase build quality.
Pull requests (PR) act as a point of code review and testing: For the Microsoft VSTS
team, every pull request triggers more than 70,000 tests, which run in less than 7 minutes.
This enforces code review—and while it might break the current PR, it won’t break the build
itself. Instead, it highlights the bugs that need to be fixed to be added to the build.
Release flow branching structure: The master branch is the VSTS team’s single source of
truth. With every bug, topic, and release, branches are created off the main branch.
Whenever a team is ready to deploy, they create a new release branch. By hot-fixing live site
incidents in the main branch and cherry picking them into key release branches, we ensure
that a bug fix is not lost in future releases. The pull process is designed to keep this master
branch healthy and safeguarded.
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
“There cannot be a more important thing for an
engineer, for a product team, than to
work on the systems that drive our
productivity. So, I would, any day
of the week, trade off features for
our own productivity. I want our
best engineers to work on our
engineering systems, so that
we can later on come back
and build all of the new
concepts we want.
“Satya Nadella
CEO, Microsoft
11
DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
Infrastructure as a flexible resource
Finally, lets dig into infrastructure as a flexible resource. This is one of the major areas of
maturity where Microsoft is continuing to improve right now:
From VMs to Azure DevTest Labs: One of the crucial ways infrastructure has become an
essential resource to digital agility is the movement of workstations to the cloud. With the
ability to work on the same code, documents, and more across devices, your team can work
from anywhere. This allows for consistency and scalability across devices—whether demoing
for a customer, working from home, or working in the office.
Multiple datacenters with incremental roll out: With multiple datacenters across Azure’s
global capability, we’re now able to do incremental roll outs across datacenters. By sharing
platform services across datacenters, we can provide all the tools needed, while also creating
unique environments when necessary.
Architecture modernization: Application modernization is a necessary and important step
that needs to be given attention. Team effectiveness is increased by moving to cloud-native
apps, and microservices are playing an increasing role. Microservices refer to an architectural
pattern that works through the composition of a distributed application from separately
deployable services. These services perform distinct business functions and communicate
over web interfaces. The idea is to have distinct teams build the different building blocks of
the system, with those pieces coming together to build larger systems. With changes such
as this, Microsoft teams are working to raise redundancy and scalability while lowering cost
both on-premises and in the cloud.
Adopting Dev Ops is a journey
As we’ve demonstrated, DevOps is a crucial component of a digitally agile organization.
However, you can’t simply say to your team “we’re doing scrum now” or skip ahead to the
part of digital agility that feels most impactful for your organization. The process of adopting
DevOps takes time, and when done right, it will transform your organization’s ability to build
with quality and speed.
No two DevOps journeys are the same, and a one-size-fits-all approach will not be
successful. Every organization has unique features, advantages, and disadvantages, as
well as business goals and vision. Developing a tailored approach for your digitally agile
transformation requires starting from where your organization is, not where you wish it was.
Customer Example
Rabobank
To improve competitiveness and drive growth, Rabobank made a strategic choice to harvest the value of
the cloud. After spending 18 months investigating and implementing several different cloud platforms,
both private and public, Rabobank realized its approaches were not yielding the right results. Siloed
teams and fragmented efforts across the organization made real transformation impossible, preventing
gains in efficiency and agility. To help drive the cultural shifts required to achieve its business goals,
Rabobank brought Microsoft Services into its strategic conversations. By doing so, within six months,
Rabobank received the guidance and expertise it needed to build a new “cloud-native” leadership
organization called the Cloud Competence Center (CCC). It actively works to increase collaboration
between previously siloed groups and help people adjust their roles to take advantage of cloud services.
Microsoft Services also helped Rabobank build a seamless, highly flexible and secure cloud platform that
supports previous investments and new accelerated workflows. Public Cloud adoption is now central to
Rabobank’s IT strategy and is being used to support the bank’s core processes and services. The
company’s new growth-focused mindset is already yielding results. More than 75 development teams
are seeing gains in efficiency, and one has already built a new mortgage model that is saving the bank
thousands of dollars every month.
“Microsoft Services is instrumental in
helping us overcome our biggest challenge,
which is adopting a cloud-first mindset.
“Henk Van Driel
Manager, Cloud Competence Center, Rabobank⁹
9 http://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/rabobank
12
Next steps – initiating your
Digital Agility journey
As you think about how to incorporate DevOps and digital agility into your organization,
Microsoft Services is here to guide you through every step of the journey. Trusted by the
world’s largest organizations, Microsoft Services provides thought-leadership and innovative
technology solutions to drive business results. With extensive experience in working with
enterprises to adopt practices and approaches to drive digital agility, our experts are ready
to work with you to drive results at your business and develop your capabilities.
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
We invite you to begin your journey by scheduling a discovery workshop with us.
When will you invest in your agile future?
Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more. For more information about
Consulting and Support Solutions from Microsoft, visit www.microsoft.com/services.
DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
What’snext?
No matter where you are on your digital transformation journey,
Microsoft Services can help.
Empower employees
Empower a high-quality, committed
digital workforce to work as a team
anywhere, on any device, with
seamless data access—helping you
innovate, meet compliance
requirements, and deliver
exceptional customer experiences.
Engage customers
Reimagine the customer experience for a
digital world and deliver more value
through insights and relevant offers by
engaging customers in natural, highly
personal, and innovative ways throughout
the customer journey—driving increased
relevance, loyalty, and profitability.
Optimize operations
Gain breakthrough insights into risk
and operational models with
advanced analytics solutions and act
on real-time intelligence to optimize
risk management and meet
regulatory requirements.
Transform products
Drive agility with open, connected systems
and automated digital processes to
support new product development and
optimize distribution channel strategies,
while meeting the security, privacy, and
transparency expectations of customers,
regulators, and shareholders.
Credits
Many subject-matter experts from various groups at Microsoft contributed to
the conceptualization and articulation of the story contained in this document.
Amy McCullough
Director, Solution Area
Marketing, Microsoft Services
Magdalena Kasiewicz
Sr. Business Program Manager,
Microsoft Services
Contributors
Dave McKinstry
Senior Program Manager,
Microsoft Services
Andreas Botsikas
Associate Architect,
Microsoft Services
Carlos Medina
Architect, Microsoft
Services
Paul Fijnvandraat
Principal Consultant DC,
Microsoft Services
Keith Rouser
Director, Solution Spec,
Microsoft Services
Blair Shaw
Associate Architect,
Microsoft Services
Mike Schimmel
Architect, Microsoft
Services
John Johanneson
Director, Solution Spec,
Microsoft Services
Evan Ilias
Director, Business Programs,
Microsoft Services
Chris Bolash
Associate Architect,
Microsoft Services
Conor Bronsdon
Consultant,
Olive  Goose
Kurt Frampton
Sr. Designer,
Simplicity Consulting
14
Microsoft Services empowers organizations
to accelerate the value realized from their
digital experiences.
Imagine.
Realize.
Experience.
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Digital Agility: The Key to Innovation in the Digital Age (eBook)

  • 2. Tableof contents 03 What does digital agility mean for today’s businesses? 04 Why is digital agility crucial? 07 How do you realize the value of digital agility? 09 What has Microsoft learned through its own digital transformation? 13 Next steps – initiating your Digital Agility journey
  • 3. DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE What does digital agility mean for today’s businesses? In today’s business environment, time to market is crucial. Most companies recognize this and have altered their business practices to prioritize speed as technology continues to play an increasing role in determining business outcomes. Yet when speed comes at the expense of quality, will this truly help your company stand out? Realistically, the answer is no. Companies often try to institute agility to deliver increasing business value at speed. However, without building for quality at the same time, products may be delivered faster, but often with more deficiencies causing increased downtime, customer complaints, and ultimately failure. To achieve successful business outcomes as demonstrated by organizations such as Netflix or Toyota, instituting DevOps and building digital agility into your organization is crucial. Without doing so, you run the risk of your competitors outmaneuvering your organization to deliver what your customers want. What is digital agility? Digital agility is the business conversation about how to adopt DevOps and agile practices to sense, anticipate, and respond to what the market needs. The aim is to exceed customer expectations with agile operations and development. Developing this agility starts with transforming your IT processes, but can also include parallel technology updates and further cultural changes. A successful digital transformation builds a cloud-enabled organization that delivers quality software rapidly and with regularity. “With DevOps and Azure, we’re able to reduce our new-feature release cycle down to one week, and we think we can even speed that up. “Fikri Larguet Director of Cloud Services, Geico¹ 1 https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/geico What happens if you fail to adopt digitally agile practices? One classic example of businesses that failed to adopt digital agility can be found in shuttered storefronts across the world. Large, once proud buildings, at one time packed with customers, now lie empty. Above some of these empty storefronts the words “Video Rental” are emblazoned. Ten years ago, many video rental shops were central to the entertainment of their local community— with thousands of stores across the world, they were a place anybody could stop in and browse a variety of options for inexpensive entertainment. Today, video stores have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, or dTV (Japan) are the default way customers receive content, rather than physically going to a storefront. Most video stores knew this change was coming. They knew they had to become digitally agile, but couldn’t complete their digital transformation at the speed they needed to. In the US, a prevalent example is Blockbusters: they began hemorrhaging money and the company was forced to sell off thousands of storefronts. Blockbuster stores YEAR NUMBER OF STORES 2004 9000 2011 2400 2018 1 This sort of story is all too common among companies that have failed to build for a digitally agile future. When industries change, it often happens seemingly overnight. Without digital tools and business agility, traditional businesses are hard pressed to keep up with their more prepared competitors. Will your company survive without becoming digitally agile? 03 Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/09/business/09blockbuster.html https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/07/12/soon-there-only-one-blockbuster-video-store-left-u-s/781653002/
  • 4. DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT Why is digital agility crucial? Technology is increasingly driving every facet of global business. Organizations that have succeeded at digital transformation are disrupting and defeating their slower, less agile competitors. Your ultimate business goal is to deliver value to your customers, and digital agility will empower you to ship quality software faster, therefore enabling you to deliver more value. Successfully implementing digital agility promises to achieve key business goals such as: 1. Improving customer experience by delivering applications in short, rapid cycles, leveraging the power of digital customer feedback loops. 2. Moving from ideation to production faster and enabling experimentation thanks to more frequent deployments and lower change failure rates. 3. Exceeding commercial and non-commercial goals such as improving profitability, market share, and productivity. (According to the 2018 “Accelerate: State of DevOps” report based on responses from more than 20,000 technology professionals worldwide, elite DevOps performers are 1.53 times more likely to exceed goals for organizational performance.) Comparing elite DevOps performers against low performers, we find that elite performers have... How does DevOps drive digital agility? If the goal state of digital agility is the “what”, DevOps is a large part of the “how”. DevOps seeks to enable continuous delivery of value to end users through the union of people, process, and products. The word “DevOps” itself is symbolic of the multiple disciplines that are part of this digitally agile team—replacing siloed Development and Operations groups with a unified one designed to share practices and tools, with employees working in tandem on the same teams. Certain DevOps practices are especially crucial to the successful development of digital agility within your organization, and we will define a few below. 04 Source: DORA’s Accelerate: State of DevOps 2018
  • 5. DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE Agile planning The agile approach to software development emphasizes incremental delivery, collaborative teams, and continual planning and learning versus front-loaded (pre-project) planning. By employing an agile mindset, organizations drive better software development and set themselves up to implement DevOps practices. This means responding to change instead of sticking to a pre-defined plan, collaborating with customers to ensure prioritization of their actual versus imagined needs, valuing working software over documentation, and prioritizing individuals and interactions instead of bogging down in processes and tools. We’ve doubtless heard variations of this throughout the years, but the results are clear—agile implementation results in better software delivered in a shorter time frame than other methodologies. While adopting certain agile techniques does not in itself move you all the way to a digitally agile state, it is a crucial part of the puzzle. Despite misconceptions, agile methodology does not lack rigor or planning. Rather, agile is about continual planning throughout the project, and planning for changes with a willingness to adapt as needed. This is part of the reason why Microsoft specifies agile planning as a key part of DevOps, versus agile delivery or an agile framework. By establishing this agility in the culture of your organization, you will plan effectively throughout a project’s lifecycle, leading to improved collaboration, continual planning and learning, and increased frequency of shipping high quality software—all of which can put you ahead of your competitors. Continuous integration Another important feature of DevOps is continuous integration (CI). CI is a process that is designed to encourage developers to share their code and work together by automating the code building and testing process each time a developer makes changes. All changes are automatically merged into a shared version control repository after the completion of each small task. Version control is designed to maintain multiple layers, or versions, of built code to facilitate easy isolation and fixing of bugs. Whenever a team member “commits” code to the repository, an automated system builds, tests, and validates the trunk or “master branch” of the code. Since software developers often work in isolation, CI encourages them to integrate their code into the overall code base regularly instead of waiting weeks to merge code. This helps to avoid conflicts and duplicated efforts, keeps team strategies aligned, and cuts down on hard-to-fix bugs by catching them when they occur rather than farther down the line. When bugs are caught early in the development cycle, they’re much easier and significantly less expensive to fix. CI provides a crucial boost to build quality, while also ensuring team interactivity on projects where developers may try to work in isolation counter to the collaborative teams that form the core of DevOps and digital agility. EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT Continuous delivery Continuous delivery (CD) is a lean practice that focuses on keeping production fresh and minimizing time to deploy, one of our key performance indicators (KPIs). By using version control and automation, CD can minimize the time it takes to deploy new software and the time it takes to mitigate production issues. This eliminates idle time and delivers more value, with greater frequency. This process has become mandatory for many organizations, so they can deliver value to end users continually and without errors. Continuous integration enables the CD process and creates the regulatory structure that cuts down on errors and production time. Under previous models, application and operations teams found it all too common for software release cycles to be bogged down. Without automated builds and integration in a version-controlled environment, software releases were often unreliable and prone to errors or delays. By using this modern release pipeline, development teams can quickly deploy new features with more confidence in their reliability. Mistakes found in production are caught quickly and fixed. By combining continuous integration with continuous delivery, the business creates a continuous stream of customer value. Application monitoring Effective monitoring is critical in DevOps because it enables continuous improvement. It increases customer satisfaction, acquisition, and retention by continually providing feedback on an application’s performance and usage patterns. This information is crucial to how and what the development team builds and allows them to deliver what customers need at speed. Effective monitoring doubles as a “test in production” so that teams are receiving a continual flow of key customer data and can spot and mitigate production incidents promptly. This monitoring element combines with the continuous deployment pipeline to enable quick and painless action on any changes that need to be made post-release. Another key feature of effective monitoring is continuous learning and validation by collecting telemetry on usage. This concept views each new deployment of software as an opportunity to track data and support or diminish the hypotheses that led to the deployment in the first place. By tracking usage differences between versions, teams can measure the impact they are having and use that telemetry to drive future business decisions. This is an important way to build in customer responsiveness and allows teams to make data-informed decisions to fail fast or pivot. 05
  • 6. DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT Automation Enabled by dynamically scaled cloud capabilities, automation is crucial to achieving digital agility and to adopting DevOps practices. Without automation, it is impossible to use policies such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, and application monitoring at scale. Automation is one of the core practices of digital agility because it enables teams to focus on the most important decisions and work, while also building in layers of monitoring and protection in the process. A great example of this can be seen in HP LaserJet’s printer business. During their digital transformation they built a continuous improvement initiative and invested in automation, including a focus on automating testing. Thanks to this, they were able to cut down on other tasks and increase the time their teams spend on developing new features by 700 percent.⁴ How has the cloud enabled digital agility? There is a reason that we specifically call out digital agility. Before the cloud, agile practices were in place at many organizations, however cloud integration is necessary to reach the full potential of these practices. Cloud- only analytics streams and automation workloads bring to the forefront concepts such as continuous integration and continuous delivery across teams. With an increased opportunity to collaborate, more adept and agile tools, and new automation and analytics opportunities, agile practices are coming to fruition in the cloud. By using public cloud services, businesses can innovate, save money, and build agility while retaining control through flexible service delivery and operations capability. TEAMS THAT ADOPT ESSENTIAL CLOUD CHARACTERISTICS ARE 23 TIMES MORE LIKELY TO BE ELITE PERFORMERS. Source: 2018 “Accelerate: State of DevOps”, Strategies for a New Economy 4 itrevolution.com/the-amazing-devops-transformation-of-thehp-laserjet-firmware-team-gary-gruver What are the key agility practices to employ? There are myriad opportunities to improve and build agility in your organization, but some practices are particularly important: Automation first: Whenever automation can be used to free up your team and ensure quality, it should be used. Production first: Get features into production and get real feedback instead of forcing perfection. Collaboration along with team autonomy: Give teams the opportunity to set goals and encourage collaboration through use of technology and processes. Customer focus: Always be customer-focused and track customer feedback and telemetry. Flexible infrastructure: Infrastructure should enable your team to be flexible and successful, not bog you down with tiresome processes. Quality: Ensure quality by using processes such as continuous integration and automated testing. 06
  • 7. DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE How do you realize the value of digital agility? It is important to remember that digital agility isn’t a magic wand you can wave to fix problems overnight. It is crucial to remember that digital agility is a step-by-step journey to realize the full promise of the cloud through DevOps practices that enable you to continuously deliver quality software. EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT Why do so many companies’ digital transformations fail? Many companies have tried to transform digitally and many of them have failed to achieve a truly agile state. There is good reason for this—building a digitally nimble state is challenging. Agility is nearly impossible to achieve from a top down or bottom up approach. Instead, a successful transformation takes buy-in from business leaders, management, and the employee community that will be using agile practices. Without ongoing engagement with business managers and users through a continuous stream of new or altered software, agile practices don’t work. Truly, without the technological capabilities unlocked by cloud transformation, agility on its own only goes so far. For most companies, this change requires a significant shift left (building for quality) in infrastructure, team operations, and other areas such as business governance. To properly transform, companies must make parallel transformations in both technology and agility. Otherwise, company culture and the internal politics of the company will derail a successful transformation. Without paying attention to cultural, political, and strategic concerns along with the standard budgetary and technology concerns, it is extremely difficult to create successful change. You need to ask yourself: • How is my company addressing potential conflicts that could derail our transformation? • What can we do to prepare ourselves to successfully implement digital agility? • What can we do to break down the siloed walls between teams without causing conflict? • Why are some of our competitors finding success with digital agility? 07 Source: DORA’s Accelerate: State of DevOps 2018
  • 8. DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT Why is constant learning so important for digital agility and company success? We are not perfect. This belief should be at the core of every digital transformation and it should lead to perhaps the most important facet of digital transformation: continual learning. By learning from telemetry, having regular team learning discussions, sharing best practices, and using processes and tools to encourage people to learn and adapt, our goal is to continually improve our processes and tools. The more effectively we learn, the more value we can deliver to our customers. Some of the most important data to collect to enable learning falls into four KPIs: 1. Lead time: the time from the start of a development cycle to deployment, a key efficiency measure of the development process 2. Deployment frequency: the measure of how often software is being delivered, perhaps our most crucial goal to deliver customer value 3. Mean time to restore (MTTR): tracks how long it takes to recover from a failure in production 4. Change fail percentage: the rate of failure in deployment, which limits the value of the rapid, frequent deployments needed to realize the promise of digital agility These key findings, and others, enable the constant learning function that is at the core of digital agility’s iterative process. High-performing organizations consistently excel on these four indicators. In 2017, high performers saw an MTTR of less than one hour versus the 1 to 7 days of their low performing counterparts, a change failure rate of less than 15% versus competitors’ 31 to 45%, and consistently better overall returns.⁵ 5 Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations, 2017 “Instead of telling people to wait for six months for a new feature, we can give it to them in a few weeks. Our lead cycles are getting much shorter, and we have business stakeholders involved so that our solutions are more aligned with business requirements. “Johan Krebbers IT Chief Technology Officer, Royal Dutch Shell⁶ 6 https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/top-oil-gas-firm-accelerates-software-development-to-fuel-global-energy- production 08
  • 9. DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT What has Microsoft learned through its own digital transformation? Before we even began to help other organizations with their digital transformations, we learned a lot at Microsoft through our own digital transformation. The key learnings can be broken down into five critical habits of DevOps, many of which were developed through the digital agility transformation of the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)⁷ , a service shared with both our internal teams and our customers: 7 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/devops-at-microsoft/moving-cloud-cadence EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT Customer focus Being customer-focused has several key facets. Here are the tenets we follow: 1. Actively listen to your customers: Use a variety of tools to capture the voice of the customer and seek out their feedback. 2. Collect application telemetry: Utilize native cloud services like Microsoft Azure Application Insights and its powerful search and query analytics tools. 3. Identify and measure KPIs which are important for customers: Track engineering process velocity with the data collected through telemetry and build tracking. Focus on tracking the things most important to customers, such as cycle times to release a feature or fix an issue. Feed this data into a dashboard that keeps key stakeholders and teams informed. 4. Develop customer-focused hypotheses to maximize learning and value: Start software builds from the hypothesis that X customer wants Y product because it delivers Z value. Then build, measure, and learn to validate the hypothesis. By proving, disproving, or noting as inconclusive, you can maximize learning and work to deliver more value to customers. 5. Fine-tune customer experience with feature flags: Ship features every 3 weeks and bug-fixes one or more times a day as necessary. Use feature flags (if-else statements) to progressively expose, activate, or disable features that are in production for everyone or for selected users. 09
  • 10. DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE Production-first mindset Another key habit is a production-first mindset. To achieve this mindset, you need: 1. Live site incidents (LSI): Applications running in production are constantly monitored, and when problems are detected or reported, an incident response team for the application is contacted. If needed, the on-call disaster response incident (DRI) team for the application is contacted. The DRI team will often have both the Dev and Ops on-call team for the application notified. Data is gathered to identify the root cause of the issue, and a mitigation developed and released to production through the release pipeline. 2. Be transparent: It is crucial to document all live site issues, their root causes, and solutions. That data needs to be made available to customers, so they can see what occurred that impacted them. By providing this information, you develop a stronger customer connection. 3. Alerting is the key to fast detection: In an ideal state, every alert should be actionable and represent a real issue with the application. Work to have zero false alerts and activate alert auto-notification of DRIs. 4. Completely automate all deployments: The power of automation to enable digital agility is essential—every infrastructure and application change is checked into source control to ensure that no one-time commands are run manually. This allows you to regulate and track all deployments. 5. Track deployments in production: Every deployment is tracked and monitored in the release-management tool. By using a ringed deployment model, you can detect issues as they occur, making them easier to resolve. 6. Employ circuit breakers to limit impact: Design your application so you can manage for failure such as service dependency failure, latency tolerance, and fault tolerance logic. 7. Security mindset: Bring people in to perform penetration testing of your application and systems. You should also embed automated security testing as part of the CI/CD pipeline. Be proactive in learning and sharing the lessons learned. EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT Team autonomy and enterprise alignment To build team autonomy and cultural enterprise alignment, focus on three key indicators: People: Developers and Operations should work together as one DevOps team. Process: All processes through the complete lifecycle should be performed by the DevOps team. Tools: The team should be responsible for the complete stack—from infrastructure to application to data. While focusing on these pieces to build team autonomy, you also need to consider alignment with the overall culture of the enterprise. This means shifting roles and accountability to match agile functions, driving planning through continual learning informed by customer feedback and usage telemetry, and increasing communication among and across teams. It also means removing siloes and decentralizing current risk management practices. By also building in team autonomy within the larger organization—and allowing the agile team to function properly and “fail fast” through incremental implementation and delivery—your organization can get the most out of your agile teams. While it’s recommended for organizations to use agile methodology across the enterprise to achieve best results, this understandably isn’t always feasible. You can instill digital agility in key facets of the enterprise by giving teams the cultural abilities and autonomy necessary to achieve success through agile methodologies. “By bringing together our departments instead of keeping them siloed, we could better use all the capabilities available to us and gain speed. Microsoft Services helped us to achieve that. “Erik Jongsma Product Owner, Rabobank⁸ 8 http://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/rabobank 10
  • 11. DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE Shift left quality The fourth key habit dives into technical terminology, but in the end its all about building for quality: Bug cap: Bug cap is an important metric allowing a set number of defects per engineer. If engineers go above the bug cap, they are unable to work on any features in the current or next work sprint until the team pays down their “defect debt”. Practices such as the bug cap help to ensure quality builds and force engineers to maintain interest in continuous integration. Shift left from integration to unit tests: Over time, pivot to simple tests that anyone can run at any time in the process—even in production. This allows tests to be fast and effective, so that they can be run continuously and increase build quality. Pull requests (PR) act as a point of code review and testing: For the Microsoft VSTS team, every pull request triggers more than 70,000 tests, which run in less than 7 minutes. This enforces code review—and while it might break the current PR, it won’t break the build itself. Instead, it highlights the bugs that need to be fixed to be added to the build. Release flow branching structure: The master branch is the VSTS team’s single source of truth. With every bug, topic, and release, branches are created off the main branch. Whenever a team is ready to deploy, they create a new release branch. By hot-fixing live site incidents in the main branch and cherry picking them into key release branches, we ensure that a bug fix is not lost in future releases. The pull process is designed to keep this master branch healthy and safeguarded. EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT “There cannot be a more important thing for an engineer, for a product team, than to work on the systems that drive our productivity. So, I would, any day of the week, trade off features for our own productivity. I want our best engineers to work on our engineering systems, so that we can later on come back and build all of the new concepts we want. “Satya Nadella CEO, Microsoft 11
  • 12. DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT Infrastructure as a flexible resource Finally, lets dig into infrastructure as a flexible resource. This is one of the major areas of maturity where Microsoft is continuing to improve right now: From VMs to Azure DevTest Labs: One of the crucial ways infrastructure has become an essential resource to digital agility is the movement of workstations to the cloud. With the ability to work on the same code, documents, and more across devices, your team can work from anywhere. This allows for consistency and scalability across devices—whether demoing for a customer, working from home, or working in the office. Multiple datacenters with incremental roll out: With multiple datacenters across Azure’s global capability, we’re now able to do incremental roll outs across datacenters. By sharing platform services across datacenters, we can provide all the tools needed, while also creating unique environments when necessary. Architecture modernization: Application modernization is a necessary and important step that needs to be given attention. Team effectiveness is increased by moving to cloud-native apps, and microservices are playing an increasing role. Microservices refer to an architectural pattern that works through the composition of a distributed application from separately deployable services. These services perform distinct business functions and communicate over web interfaces. The idea is to have distinct teams build the different building blocks of the system, with those pieces coming together to build larger systems. With changes such as this, Microsoft teams are working to raise redundancy and scalability while lowering cost both on-premises and in the cloud. Adopting Dev Ops is a journey As we’ve demonstrated, DevOps is a crucial component of a digitally agile organization. However, you can’t simply say to your team “we’re doing scrum now” or skip ahead to the part of digital agility that feels most impactful for your organization. The process of adopting DevOps takes time, and when done right, it will transform your organization’s ability to build with quality and speed. No two DevOps journeys are the same, and a one-size-fits-all approach will not be successful. Every organization has unique features, advantages, and disadvantages, as well as business goals and vision. Developing a tailored approach for your digitally agile transformation requires starting from where your organization is, not where you wish it was. Customer Example Rabobank To improve competitiveness and drive growth, Rabobank made a strategic choice to harvest the value of the cloud. After spending 18 months investigating and implementing several different cloud platforms, both private and public, Rabobank realized its approaches were not yielding the right results. Siloed teams and fragmented efforts across the organization made real transformation impossible, preventing gains in efficiency and agility. To help drive the cultural shifts required to achieve its business goals, Rabobank brought Microsoft Services into its strategic conversations. By doing so, within six months, Rabobank received the guidance and expertise it needed to build a new “cloud-native” leadership organization called the Cloud Competence Center (CCC). It actively works to increase collaboration between previously siloed groups and help people adjust their roles to take advantage of cloud services. Microsoft Services also helped Rabobank build a seamless, highly flexible and secure cloud platform that supports previous investments and new accelerated workflows. Public Cloud adoption is now central to Rabobank’s IT strategy and is being used to support the bank’s core processes and services. The company’s new growth-focused mindset is already yielding results. More than 75 development teams are seeing gains in efficiency, and one has already built a new mortgage model that is saving the bank thousands of dollars every month. “Microsoft Services is instrumental in helping us overcome our biggest challenge, which is adopting a cloud-first mindset. “Henk Van Driel Manager, Cloud Competence Center, Rabobank⁹ 9 http://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/rabobank 12
  • 13. Next steps – initiating your Digital Agility journey As you think about how to incorporate DevOps and digital agility into your organization, Microsoft Services is here to guide you through every step of the journey. Trusted by the world’s largest organizations, Microsoft Services provides thought-leadership and innovative technology solutions to drive business results. With extensive experience in working with enterprises to adopt practices and approaches to drive digital agility, our experts are ready to work with you to drive results at your business and develop your capabilities. EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT We invite you to begin your journey by scheduling a discovery workshop with us. When will you invest in your agile future? Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more. For more information about Consulting and Support Solutions from Microsoft, visit www.microsoft.com/services.
  • 14. DIGITAL AGILITY – THE KEY TO INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT What’snext? No matter where you are on your digital transformation journey, Microsoft Services can help. Empower employees Empower a high-quality, committed digital workforce to work as a team anywhere, on any device, with seamless data access—helping you innovate, meet compliance requirements, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. Engage customers Reimagine the customer experience for a digital world and deliver more value through insights and relevant offers by engaging customers in natural, highly personal, and innovative ways throughout the customer journey—driving increased relevance, loyalty, and profitability. Optimize operations Gain breakthrough insights into risk and operational models with advanced analytics solutions and act on real-time intelligence to optimize risk management and meet regulatory requirements. Transform products Drive agility with open, connected systems and automated digital processes to support new product development and optimize distribution channel strategies, while meeting the security, privacy, and transparency expectations of customers, regulators, and shareholders. Credits Many subject-matter experts from various groups at Microsoft contributed to the conceptualization and articulation of the story contained in this document. Amy McCullough Director, Solution Area Marketing, Microsoft Services Magdalena Kasiewicz Sr. Business Program Manager, Microsoft Services Contributors Dave McKinstry Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Services Andreas Botsikas Associate Architect, Microsoft Services Carlos Medina Architect, Microsoft Services Paul Fijnvandraat Principal Consultant DC, Microsoft Services Keith Rouser Director, Solution Spec, Microsoft Services Blair Shaw Associate Architect, Microsoft Services Mike Schimmel Architect, Microsoft Services John Johanneson Director, Solution Spec, Microsoft Services Evan Ilias Director, Business Programs, Microsoft Services Chris Bolash Associate Architect, Microsoft Services Conor Bronsdon Consultant, Olive Goose Kurt Frampton Sr. Designer, Simplicity Consulting 14
  • 15. Microsoft Services empowers organizations to accelerate the value realized from their digital experiences. Imagine. Realize. Experience. microsoft.com/services © 2018 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.