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Anyone who knows anything about the application economy is embracing agile, DevOps and cloud – and with good reason. Agile empowers you to more rapidly deliver code that more precisely meets the immediate needs of the business. DevOps helps you get that code into production without delay, and improve software quality through enhanced feedback loops between development and operations. And cloud safeguards your user experience by adaptively responding to fluctuations in session volume, data intensity and other workload characteristics.

These are the gains. But there is a myth that agile, DevOps, and cloud can also be disruptive to both IT and the business. Many fear that the migration to agile-DevOps-cloud can create new pains for both sets of stakeholders – which can lead to hesitation or uncertainty around adoption.

However, rest assured that these pains – while founded in reality – can easily be avoided.

New pains for IT

There are three commonly cited pains for IT. First, it’s true that getting agile-DevOps-cloud right isn’t easy. It requires new tools, new skills and new processes. This transformation can be especially daunting for enterprises running applications across multiple platforms of various vintages. Tools, skills, and processes for those platforms tend to be entrenched. So there is a common misperception that agile-DevOps-cloud is as much about undoing the wrong things as it is about doing the right ones.

In an organisation with many entrenched systems and processes, this undoing can be so daunting that it prevents moving forward. However agile-DevOps-cloud doesn’t need to undo entrenched systems—at least not at first. Typically, a transition starts with a business imperative: for example launching a new software application. This can be done in parallel, without affecting legacy systems. Once the business sees the benefits of this approach, the same principles can be gradually spread out to other projects and systems.

Others fear that agile-DevOps-cloud can turn into a game of Whack-a-Mole. Just when you solve one bottleneck or quality issue, you discover another. Get your scrum management tight, and you realise you need service virtualisation to accelerate testing. Implement service virtualisation, and you realise you need to get better at looping input from the field back into your requirements.

However while striving for speed and quality can be ceaseless, it doesn’t need to be gruelling. This game of Whack-a-Mole can be largely avoided by proper planning. Think through the bottlenecks in your organisation and try to address them proactively at the start of your project. Of course, like any improvement project, there will always be things that weren’t foreseen—but rather than think of these things as a negative, it’s better to view them as opportunities for continued improvement.

Which brings us to the third perceived pain-point for IT. The argument here typically goes something like: “sure, agile-DevOps-cloud can help your company achieve competitive parity, but it doesn’t automatically produce competitive advantage.” To an extent this is true—if everyone is using a particular tool, it’s not an advantage by itself. Differentiators are only differentiators when they are different.

It is true that the vast majority of enterprises use clouds today; and agile is also used by more companies than not. However DevOps adoption—which is really just a fully executed extension of agile principles throughout the organisation, enabled by cloud—still remains relatively low. Advantage will only come with a combination of superior agile-DevOps-cloud execution and a superior business model.

Good isn’t quite good enough

On the business side, business leaders need to recognise that good isn’t good enough when it comes to IT improvement strategies.

Just as the goal of IT should be enabling the business objectives, so too must the business support and enable IT transformation. Business leaders should be careful about congratulating themselves for merely investing in digital just enough to get a “me-too” mobile app out the door. It takes more commitment than that to achieve true agile-DevOps-cloud superiority, and that requires the support of both business and IT leaders.

Finally, an operationally superior agile-DevOps-cloud pipeline is only half the story. Operational superiority and even the best coded software application doesn’t guarantee to win the hearts and minds of customers. For that to happen, the business itself must come up with really smart, well-differentiated digital value propositions. That’s something that can be enabled and enhanced by a superior agile-DevOps-cloud strategy, but at the end of the day the business needs to have a product customers want to buy.

Ultimately, the key takeaway businesses and IT should get from the agile-DevOps-cloud triad is this: competency does not equal excellence, and complacency kills just as easily as ignorance will. The goal for agile-DevOps-cloud adoption cannot merely be “keeping up with the Joneses”- rather, competitive excellence needs to be the end-game for businesses looking to leverage agile-DevOps-cloud.

The good news, of course, is that if you achieve agile-DevOps-cloud excellence and if your business can creatively re-think its value to the customer, the rewards can be tremendous. Just ask the folks at Dollar Shave Club or Jet.com.

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