According to Gartner’s 2017 CEO survey, the number 2 strategic priority for CEO’s is technology related business change. Not surprising when 47% the same group of CEO’s indicated they are experiencing pressure from their Boards to make progress in digital. Digital transformation is the order of the day.
Digital transformation and its impact on the customer experience
With digital banking, digital retail, digital real estate, digital manufacturing, digital hiring, digital dating, and digital ‘everything’, the competitive landscape has changed. In the digital world, competition centres on the perfect customer experience. In this competitive landscape, the early winners only have a short competitive head start at best. New or improved experiences are only few weeks of development away.
It’s no wonder then that a current CIO priority is digital transformation and its impact on customer experience. And not just external customers either, it’s becoming increasingly competitive to wow and retain internal customers too.
The CIO’s need for speed
CIO’s are prioritizing speed as a strategic initiative.
Speed of innovation, speed of project delivery, speed of business IT request fulfilment, speed of the enterprise, speed of development. To win the race in customer experience, and to stay in the race, businesses needs to run very fast. And so do SAP IT support teams. Traditional methods of managing innovation and development are slow and an entirely different approach is required.
SAP DevOps
Enter SAP DevOps. We can barely open an SAP related blog post today without reading about SAP DevOps. And fair enough too. It’s a methodology that can transform SAP IT support practice to better meet the need for speed imposed by digital transformation. DevOps principles, culture and practices are as much a part of a digital transformation journey as the transformation itself.
But what is SAP DevOps and what are the components that underpin a DevOps strategy? Over the next few postings I’ll begin elaborating, but briefly, here are the key SAP DevOps component areas SAP IT teams need to address on their journey.
- Process maturation and process automation
- Multi path development and release management
- Agile development and continuous integration
- ALM integration and DevOps tool chain automation
Combined, they will form a solid foundation for SAP DevOps, enabling the SAP IT team to develop and support at the speed required, and expected.
