As part of an organization that evangelizes Agile & DevOps for SAP, it is hard to ignore the power of practicing what you preach. Sprints, collaboration, and mixed teams who help achieve overall targets of the company or even to write this blog post are certainly more effective than doing it alone.
As someone who is not on the technical side of the business, my first thoughts are that the tools and processes required for a company-wide shift in methodology wouldn’t be half as effective if we didn’t all share the same ethos and culture to support them. This idea is at the core understanding that digital transformation starts with us, the people involved.
Might my audience think I am only trying to sell products or solutions – the old software sales stereotype? I don’t see it that way because, in the world of DevOps, we are trying to shift to a new cultural mindset (the new software sales stereotype?). That is not to say that our innovative technology has nothing to do with it…
Our SAP Change and Release tools focus on automation, safer and faster change, auditability, and visibility to enable an end-to-end view of your workflow and collaboration around all changes made. By providing a centralized view of transports, removing work silos, and pushing changes through quickly and securely, our tools transform the way our customers deliver new applications to their business.
Ultimately we improve responsiveness to continuously changing business requirements through accelerating, simplifying, and modernizing SAP delivery. We look to facilitate a change of mindset away from inflexible methodologies involving slow, error-prone, manual processes towards a new collaborative and automated approach to fast and secure SAP delivery.
Karel Dörner and Jürgen Meffert’s Nine questions to help you get your digital transformation right highlights how breaking down work silos, introducing cross-functional teams, and empowering people to progressively deliver new features to their business, is a people challenge. The overriding idea behind this new collaborative mindset is that it encourages continuous improvement within the organization as well as a platform for dynamic future growth. And with that, there is more to technology than perhaps first meets the eye.
It is important to remember that a widespread business culture shift, can indeed, be influenced by the effective use of new tools – if approached correctly they can act as key drivers of transformation. Integrating shared platforms and orchestrating lines of communication to mixed-disciplined teams can have a considerable cultural impact.
If the technology within your organization supports agile and DevOps and if your team adopts and encourages the new technology, then you have fast-tracked your shift in business culture, as highlighted in this Wired Software-First Means Survival Tomorrow article. As individuals, particularly millennials, we are no strangers to tech influencing our daily lives; now we should accept it collectively at an enterprise level.
By embracing the combination of people (us), processes (agile and DevOps), and technology (automation, cloud migration, IoT, etc.) leading firms have become more adaptable to the perpetually emerging digital trends that shape business today. This goes for digitally native enterprises as well as established organizations running on legacy infrastructure looking to maintain a competitive advantage.
For legacy enterprise systems, the shift is about moving from software that only stores information to software that can dynamically distribute it to all departments of a business. With technical collaboration, you drive innovation instead of drowning in the constant levels of technical debt suffered by manually operated and siloed legacy systems.
Fortunately, as new digital trends affect the demands of our customers and the industries in which we operate, new tools and solutions are becoming hard to ignore internally. With technology as a catalyst for change, IT departments are taking on the new role of being the driver and influencer of the culture shift. As a result, people have started to embrace the idea of blending different tools to help them achieve the overall objectives of their organizations.
Those objectives are more consistently becoming software-driven, and there must be a cultural transformation to support them. Emerging digital technologies facilitate this within business, but it would be a great mistake to assume it will enable transformation standing alone.
This is why as third party vendors, Basis Technologies offer not only innovative solutions but also training and 24/7 support and maintenance as standard with a subscription license. We understand the importance of knowledge dissemination alongside new technology, influencing the necessary shift in culture.
We also understand the benefits of getting the DevOps culture right:
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Faster innovation- the adoption of DevOps into the SAP development lifecycle can bring tremendous improvements in the speed, resiliance and quality of software delivery. The end result is a better, faster, safer way to deliver SAP applications.
Continuous Delivery – DevOps for SAP allows your systems to change
continously ,
- Automation! – automate as much of the delivery pipeline as possible such as unit testing, integrity checks, and deployments to help minimize the risk and to eliminate errors. It saves time, effort, and cost of development while allowing resources to focus on more important business challenges and innovation.
- Aligning with business needs – new applications, features, and services are delivered faster and more frequently, delivering business value sooner than ever. By delivering continuously, you can respond to new business strategies and changing market conditions fast, driving business agility.
If you would like to know more about how DevOps can benefit your SAP estate and drive your business culture, please get in touch.
