DECEMBER 2018CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8hen we began pursuing our DevOps and Agile journey a few years back, it seemed daunting for many of us. With several legacy systems and tenured people that have fueled our success in the years and decades before now, the idea that we could transform how we develop and deploy our most valuable software assets seems like a challenge too big to conquer. Would we be up for the challenge? Would our IT architecture allow for seamless integration? Was it even possible?As a runner, I'm reminded of the challenges facing the late Roger Bannister in 1954 when he broke the four-minute mile barrier. At the time, everyone thought it was a barrier that was almost unbreakable. And like Mr. Bannister, once the initial barrier was broken, there was a mental barrier that was broken on that day in May of 1954, with another runner breaking the barrier just 46 days later. And in the subsequent 50+ years, over 1,000 runners have broken the four-minute mark, where before it was accomplished by Mr. Bannister, it seemed as if the record would never fall.Our journey with DevOps has been similar, once we broke the mental barrier that existed for many of our teams, we have not looked back. We had a couple of pioneer teams and leaders, and once they showed what was possible within our environment, it has been team after team also breaking through the mental models of our perceived inability to achieve true DevOps with our systems architecture or processes. But as a developer put it recently at one of regular SAFe planning events, "the life of developers is getting a lot better around here."We began an agile, cloud and DevOps journey in 2015 in earnest. Historically, developers had a huge lead time for delivery of infrastructure, middleware, databases, etc. This reinforced the waterfall model we were operating, which was also reinforced by extended lead times on credentials, secrets, pipelines, testing, and product delivery. But we set our sights on a new agile and DevOps paradigm and prepared and trained hard for the transformation. Climbing over the first barrierIn 2016, my organization embraced the journey fully, after a couple of small-scale pilots that showed enormous promise. However, many were still skeptical since these efforts were greenfield over the bulk of our systems portfolio which is WBreaking the DevOps BarrierJOHN HEVERAN, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT & CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, COMMERCIAL INSURANCE, LIBERTY MUTUAL INSURANCEIN MY VIEW
< Page 7 | Page 9 >