IT:AD:Continuous Delivery:SAD:WS:02 Business View

• (UP) – Previous (Document) – Next (Architectural Views)
• See also Appendices

• Reputation: poor reputation of the Organisation's IT Services for efficiency, cost effectiveness, reliability, transparency.
• Efficiency: an inability to respond to customer requests in a timely manner means current efficiencies are perpetuated for longer, and new functions cannot be offered because they cannot be undertaken,
• Security: searches for efficiency lead to potentially unaccounted and insecure temporary/permanent workarounds (ie: “Shadow IT”),
• Cost: adds avoidable costs to the IT Services, and therefore Organisation as a whole.

The availability of inexpensive cloud hosted infrastructure and common application services made easily managed using general public tools.

The following is a short list of some Observations and Assessments evidencing the above summary.

The Goals to meet the above Drivers include:

The Objectives to achieve the above Goals include:

• In order to align with the Organisation's Digital Strategy

  • new Development should be cloud hosted as either PaaS.
    * Services should be

  * Sector Digital Strategy Alignment: choose an appropriate SaaS based ALM Service usable for the Organisation, Sector partners and Vendors alike.

• Organisation Strategy Alignment: develop a service to streamline a PaaS development model which will reduce costs for business stakeholders.
• Determine, document and recommend an appropriate Subscription model for use of an industry standard cloud based SaaS ALM appropriate for the Organisation.
• Create Extensions to the ALM Service that can be used by all new cloud PaaS targeted projects.
• Create norms (Principles, Processes and Configuration Documentation) on the usage of the ALM and application of the Extensions.
• Organisation Principles: ITC must communicate clearly to the whole organisation cloud-ready Principles, including:
  • all new development must adhere to PaaS before IaaS.
  • IaaS requiring solutions will be hosted within ESTI/S.
  • Azure deployments are managed by Project Subscriptions, not IT bManaged Environment Subscriptions.

This organisation Behaviours represent Organisation Principles as affirmative statements:

• We get the job done  “Ka oti i a mātou ngā mahi”
• We are respectful, we listen, we learn  “He rōpū manaaki, he rōpū whakarongo, he rōpū ako mātou”
• We back ourselves and others to win  “Ka manawanui ki a mātou me ētahi ake kia wikitoria”
• We work together for maximum impact “Ka mahi ngātahi mo te tukinga nui tonu”
• Great results are our bottom line “Ko ngā huanga tino pai a mātou whāinga mutunga”

Core Values these Organisation Principles clarify influence the tools and processes chosen and described in this document.

The solution proposes an ALM solution that breaks down unnecessary barriers between business, production, support, and user stakeholders and assists

• “Collaboration and working together for maximum impact”: efficiencies are gained by using a cross team collaboration tool specifically designed for the various tasks of delivering software, rather than a hodgepodge of various tools, chosen in a silo'ed environment.
• “We learn”: by providing a cross team work item management service – included in the comprehensive ALM Service – feedback can be given, assessed, prioritized, and implemented to deliver improving value collaboratively.
• “We back ourselves and others to win” by collaborating across teams and using the most comprehensive tool on the market by the leader within the Gartner's ALM Quadrant.

The Organisation has previously engaged in attempts to improve SDLC management.

As noted above under Observations, as at many other Organisations these initiatives have not delivered the expected value.
Analyse by others indicates the agreed common cause for this failure to deliver on expectations is a lack of a continuous ongoing ALM process that incorporates Continuous Testing.

The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is limited to the phases of software development such as requirements, design, coding, testing, configuration, project management, and change management, ALM covers a broader scope. It continues after development until the application is no longer used, and may span many SDLCs.

In a 2004 survey designed by Noel Bruton (author of “How to Manage the IT Helpdesk” and “Managing the IT Services Process”), 7&% of survey respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that “ITIL does not have all the answers”.

Because of its primary focus on service management, ITIL has limited ability to managing poorly designed enterprise architectures, or feed back into the process.

ITIL does not directly address the business applications which run on the IT infrastructure; nor does it facilitate a more collaborative working relationship between development and operations teams.

The trend toward a closer working relationship between development and operations is termed: DevOps.

This trend is related to increased application release rates and the adoption of agile software development methodologies. Traditional service management processes have struggled to support increased application release rates – due to lack of automation – and/or highly complex enterprise architecture.

The Organisation has decades of investment in systems designed for its current infrastructure, that was never designed for an cloud based IaaS host environment, let alone a PaaS based host environment. These systems were designed for manual testing, and have no significant amount – if any – of automated testing. Their security accreditation process was designed to rely on network boundary security.

Systems are designed for specific target host environments, and specific maintenance and support processes. These legacy systems cannot be ported to cloud infrastructure economically, and should be maintained in their current infrastructure environment, using the infrastructure support, application support, testing and accreditation processes they were designed for.

DevOps can be be used to solve well evidenced issues with ITIL for new development projects – but cannot be reasonably expected to undue the past.

In that regard, DevOps – or any other approach – will not cause a significant change to current Resource requirements for the years the current systems are kept operational.

On the other hand, implementing DevOps processes for new development projects, hosted on PaaS cloud infrastructure, will provide faster delivery of value to stakeholders.