As companies focus on improving customer experience to increase loyalty and gain market share, and with the shift from systems of record to systems of engagement, the way solutions are built and run evolving. Customer COE organizations are looking for an approach that accommodates the requirements of third platform solutions. Expectations for solutions in the work place are no different from those used outside of the work place. More than ever, users expect high performance, the capability for rapid change, and ease of use.
The capability for rapid change is enabled by methodologies like DevOps, which focuses on solution delivery speed and quality. It's approach to increasing the frequency of deployment of solutions that operate at high levels of reliability and stability is achieved through collaboration, automation, continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous testing, continuous monitoring, and rapid remediation. The result is faster time to value, increased innovation capacity, and improved customer experience. Those organizations that establish these capabilities contribute to enterprise value by increasing business user adoption and satisfaction.
To achieve this, bimodal IT organizations are exploring these new ways of working, but not necessarily throwing the baby out with the bath water. SAP best practices and methodologies have continued to evolve with its latest innovations. The Customer COE (CCOE) model includes complementary concepts and practices that drive agility, quality and continuous improvement. Hallmarks of advanced CCOE organizations are collaboration between Business and IT units, managing quality throughout the application management life-cycle, solution transparency, and continuous improvement.
The ‘three ways’ outlined by Gene Kim, are well-aligned with the CCOE concept of integrated quality management. ‘Systems thinking’ is at the heart of CCOE quality manager roles focus on development and deployment practices that enable efficient solution operations. Transparency to solution landscape and the status of its implementation and operation activities enables collaboration and feedback across CCOE teams. Operations Control Centers improve business continuity with automation and standards that improve the performance of business processes end-to-end. Innovation Control Centers employ best practices that accelerate the time to value and smooth the transition to operations. Quality Managers, combined with the control center approach, establish standards that not only ‘shift left’ efforts to ensure smooth transition to operations, but also the foundation for KPI-driven continuous improvement.
In this series of blog posts, we'll explore integrated quality management in the context of DevOps principles.
