DevOps and Business

Chapter 4. Defining Responsibilities

Once you have established strategic Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and defined measurable organizational success criteria, it’s time to coordinate individual responsibilities to support the effort. For that, you need to make a decision on how to position technology groups to best enable business outcomes. Every organization has its own optimal path to delivery of its goods and services; your challenge is to understand it and inject or adopt technology to support it.

To determine the best approach for positioning technology groups, you need to truly understand your organization’s mission statement and strategic objectives. In most cases, however, technology focus is not included in a mission statement because most companies are not technology companies (even though they rely on technology to support and grow the business). In this chapter, we discuss assumed responsibilities for technical and nontechnical groups within an organization and the separation between local and strategic decision making.

Technology’s Place Within the Organization

As an example of how technology fits into an organization’s strategy, let’s consider a modern media company whose goal is to obtain the industry leadership in production and distribution of quality digital content. Although the business would not exist without technology, the company’s business objective is not software development; it is the production and delivery of its media content. In this scenario, ...