Technologies evolve at a pace that is intimidating to even the biggest rock stars in IT, but fortunately best practices and methodologies such as DevOps provide the know-how, tools and processes to help IT better adopt newer technologies for the greater good of the business.
Anne Hungate, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering and Quality Assurance at Union Bank, recognizes the value of the DevOps methodology and technologies such as service virtualization that help companies eliminate constraints and embrace change more frequently. With the number of moving parts in any given IT organization, there is no doubt constant change is frightening – and if not done correctly, it is also potentially debilitating to smooth operations and IT service delivery.
“Union Bank is facing the same pressures that all banks are with prolonged, low interest rates; that’s a source of revenue that’s really diminished,” Hungate explains in a recent Luminaries video interview with CA Technologies. “We are also facing a lot of pressure with technology, with customer’s desire to receive bank services via mobile devices, anywhere they are lightning fast. So, the nature of banking and the nature of the relationship are changing and we need to evolve to keep up. Continuous innovation is essential to survive.”
According to Hungate, that’s where DevOps comes in to not only equip IT to keep pace with an ever-increasing rate of change, but also to bring disparate teams together, working toward common goals. DevOps aims to bring together the teams that create and test applications with those that deploy and maintain them in production. While IT operations might not think application development falls under its purview, it is imperative that IT organizations as a whole build quality apps and deliver a superior application experience to their customers. Depending on the organization, DevOps could result in better application performance in production, fewer public outages, more frequent and faster release cycles, and ultimately higher-quality code being sent to internal end users and external customers. And DevOps lets IT confirm the results of each phase of the software lifecycle to ensure better results for the business.
Union Bank is a regional bank headquartered in San Francisco, which was formed in 1996 with the merger of Bank of Tokyo and Bank of Mitsubishi. At the beginning of her organization’s DevOps journey, Hungate emphasizes the great need for measurement to better understand how IT delivers products and services to market now so they can track how well DevOps improves those efforts. For Hungate, DevOps promises to get teams working toward the same goals to deliver better services to customers – and ultimately help the business provide innovative applications and products to customers, outpacing the competition and driving revenue.
“DevOps means IT organizations coming together for a common purpose. DevOps means we’re not rigidly controlling a production environment right now and not allowing necessary change in, but what we need to do with DevOps is to make that change high quality so we are honoring the integrity of the production environment, not compromising the experience of our customers and our associates,” Hungate says. “DevOps is really working together to get changes to the market faster.”
And for those who might consider undertaking a DevOps implementation overwhelming, Hungate says it might not require an organization to change itself completely – but rather to be open to the idea of changing how teams better work together and collaborate to achieve common goals for the business.
“What’s interesting about DevOps is I don’t think you need a major reorganization to change the way you think and collaborate. What you need is a common purpose. A reorganization may or may not follow, but a common purpose, that’s what gets everybody working together and understanding we’re one team,” Hungate says. “The real benefit we’re seeing is associated engagement. The fighting, the silos, they’re gone because we’re working for a common purpose. We’re trying to get products and services to market faster.”
Watch Hungate’s entire interview discussion around DevOps and service virtualization here.