Technologists and The Business Must Execute at The Speed of DevOps

Licensed for individual use only
Technologists — And The Business — Must

Execute At The Speed Of DevOps
Intermediate Level: People Practices For IT Transformation
by Gordon Barnett
April 8, 2019
Why Read This Report Key Takeaways

Intermediate organizations have the basics well in Breaking Siloes Is Only The First Step
hand. They’ve broken down silos, institutionalized To mature into an advanced IT org, intermediate
customer centricity, and built a foundation of IT orgs must develop a culture of collaboration
agile processes. However, to advance, CIOs and between internal and external stakeholders to
other technology leaders must shift their focus deliver the firm’s strategic objectives.
beyond customer experience (CX) to employee
Rightsizing Talent Pools Is Key For Agility
experience (EX), develop resource pools and
CIOs must utilize the gig economy to ensure that
redefine how work is done to benefit from
IT can meet dynamic demand. Rightsizing the
automation technologies. This report provides
core competencies within IT is key to success.
an overview of Forrester’s framework for how
intermediate IT organizations can mature to Customer Centricity Is The Top Priority
become an advanced IT organization. A prerequisite for advanced IT orgs is embedded
CX. CIOs must put in place customer-centric
governance and change processes across the
whole IT organization.
This PDF is only licensed for individual use when downloaded from forrester.com or reprints.forrester.com. All other distribution prohibited.
forrester.com
For CIOs
Technologists — And The Business — Must Execute At The Speed

Of DevOps
by Gordon Barnett
with Glenn O’Donnell, Bobby Cameron, David K. Johnson, Charles Betz, Chris Gardner,
Diego Lo Giudice, and Audrey Hecht
April 8, 2019
Table Of Contents Related Research Documents

2 The Foundation Of An Adaptable IT 2019 US Tech Talent Market Outlook
Organization Is Customer Centricity
Customer Service Reboot: The Rise Of The Gig
Skilled Workers That Collaborate Are Key To Economy
Customer-Centric IT Organizations
The Employee Experience Imperative
To Realize Customer Centricity, CIOs Must
Look At Culture Across The Whole IT
Ecosystem
Share reports with colleagues.
Agile Organization Structures Set The
Enhance your membership with
Foundation For Adaptable IT Organizations
Research Share.
7 Intermediate Organizations Need To Be
More Strategic
Recommendations
8 The Mandate For Intermediate Organizations

Is To Execute With Speed
Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA

+1 617-613-6000 | Fax: +1 617-613-5000 | forrester.com
© 2019 Forrester Research, Inc. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®,
Technographics®, Forrester Wave, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research,
Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. Unauthorized copying or distributing
is a violation of copyright law. Citations@forrester.com or +1 866-367-7378
For CIOs April 8, 2019
Technologists — And The Business — Must Execute At The Speed Of DevOps
The Foundation Of An Adaptable IT Organization Is Customer Centricity

The continuously evolving demands of stakeholders — customers, employees, and others —
are putting enormous pressure on IT organizations to evolve.1 Many CIOs have evolved their IT
transformation and reached an intermediate state but have yet to put in place plans to progress to
advanced. The biggest barriers to attaining an advanced level of maturity are people based; how to
resource work, how to design work, and how to get employees engaged and behave in ways that
expand the business.
Skilled Workers That Collaborate Are Key To Customer-Centric IT Organizations
IT organizations that have transformed and reached a beginner level have established basic skills,
customer-centric principles, and effective structures. Maturing to an intermediate level requires
supporting the existing construction and customizing it as needed. CIOs should start by optimizing
around efficient work and taking advantage of individual expertise, while looking outside of IT or even
the firm when demand spikes.2 Build job-centric training and focus on collaboration. CIOs that have
transformed their IT organizations and reached an intermediate maturity level have implemented talent
management practices that result in (see Figure 1):
›› Strong business and IT collaboration, with clear delineation of responsibilities. In an IT

organization with beginner maturity, business and IT roles have low levels of collaboration and IT
often acts as an order taker. In an intermediate level of maturity, CIOs focus more on the jobs to
be done and skills required to perform the job. They encourage collaboration and ensure there are
clears lines of responsibility for business and IT employees, particularly in planning.3 The CIO talent
management strategy is focused on acquiring talent with specialist and soft skills that help the
organization achieve its customer-centric goals and objectives.
For example, an IT executive at an African bank told us that they organize into multidisciplinary
teams (tribes) to collaboratively deal with challenges they experience with cross-portfolio
dependencies during their portfolio planning activities.
›› Efficient utilization of the gig economy as a source of freelancers. IT organizations have used
external resources, whether they be contractors or consultants, for many years. Those with a
beginner level of maturity have used the contractor market effectively. However, CIOs that reached
an intermediate level of maturity established commercial arrangements with staff augmentation
firms to meet demand spikes or to build new technology capabilities.4 These CIOs maintain a
repository of preferred freelancers to ensure quality.
For example, the CIO at a large international airline group has undertaken building relationships
with three global staff augmentation firms to provide on-demand specialist skills in areas such as
cybersecurity, AI, and cloud integration. The CIO has used past change programs to determine the
optimum level of internal resources in these areas of specialty. The staff augmentation firms will
provide additional on-demand resources when business priorities change and demand for these
specialties increase.
© 2019 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. 2
Citations@forrester.com or +1 866-367-7378
›› Job-centric training for employees to enable IT to implement new technologies. Employee

engagement is the primary factor in productivity. However, IT organizations that reached a beginner
level of maturity rarely consider the needs of the employee. Rather, they have top-down defined
training programs. CIOs at an intermediate level of maturity have implemented communities of
practice, centers of excellence, and in-house curriculum to develop or reskill their staff in key areas,
which will enable IT to deliver the firm’s goals and objectives. Employees who can learn new skills
become happier and more productive.
For example, IT executives at a multinational financial services firm told us that they have
introduced centers of excellence for deep and scarce skills — e.g., for targeting marketing as well
as for AI and cognitive computing.
FIGURE 1 Intermediate IT Organizations Focus On Optimizing Work Effort
Beginner Intermediate
Strong collaboration between

Separate roles, limited
business and IT, but clear
exchange, cross-role teams
delineation of responsibilities
In-house and contractor, seek Utilize the gig economy to

source of talent find freelancers
Provide job-centric training to

Top-down training program
employees; retention,
management identifies
motivation provide a base of
training needs
skills you need
To Realize Customer Centricity, CIOs Must Look At Culture Across The Whole IT Ecosystem
Customer-obsession is a key driver for the modern organization. However, the journey to customer
obsession is often littered with cultural barriers, such as exhibiting aversion to risk, being revenue or
product focused rather than customer focused, and siloed business units. CIOs have long recognized
that the culture of the IT organization is the sum of the cultures of each person working within the IT
ecosystem.5 CIOs at beginner level IT organizations identify key customer-centric behaviors; however, IT
organizations with an intermediate maturity level have fully adopted a culture of customer centricity within
the whole IT ecosystem (see Figure 2). Intermediate IT organizations demonstrate the following attributes:
›› Institutionalization of specific customer-centric employee behaviors. Customer centricity is

the first level of experience maturity. Advanced customer centricity extends far beyond customer-
facing functions to become a unifying cultural element that drives all core decisions across all
areas of the organization.6 When customer focus is poor, organizations struggle to optimize
integrated touchpoints, journeys, and consistent experiences. Beginner IT organizations identify
key customer-centricity behavior and define principles but are low on adoption. Intermediate IT
organizations implement advanced customer centricity. CIOs of intermediate IT organizations have
well-defined processes that guide the customer-centric operations of IT.
For example, an IT executive at a North American financial services organization advised us that
they recognized the need to empower their frontline associates if they were to achieve certain
customer-centric behaviors. They started finding the right people for the most critical roles and
provided them with an environment to solve problems with less hierarchy and constraints than
previously imposed. They then communicated, evangelized, and adopted the new or modified
employee processes that had generated the right customer outcomes.
›› Adoption of enterprisewide and customer-centric governance. Siloed decision making has often
been touted as a key barrier to organizational transformation — creating bottlenecks that hinder
speed. Beginner IT organizations focused on effective governance, though their decisions may still
be made in silos. Intermediate level IT organizations broke the status quo of hierarchical and silo
decision making, building enterprisewide trust models that are driven by customer centricity.
For example, the CIO at a major UK banking group explained that the firm created an environment
called customer journey labs, which comprised delivery teams, product managers, and customer
journey subject matter experts. This created autonomous teams aligned with customer journeys.
The composition of the teams fluctuates based on the requirements of each product and service but
always includes design (shaping) and delivery (feature) functions. Governance is delegated to the
autonomous teams with the hope that they will collaborate and deliver more end-to-end cohesion.
›› Implementation of enablers that make behavior change easier. Communicating behavioral

success stories and rewarding employees that display the specific behavior is a powerful force for
change. The success stories show that the organization already has bright spots to build on. Beginner
IT organizations celebrate customer-centric behaviors in weekly or monthly meetings. Intermediate IT
organizations have built enablers that further encourage customer-obsessed behaviors.7
For example, a CIO of a US financial cooperative advised us that they adopted a best practice of
linking each employee behavior to a corresponding high-level CX value. They have six high-level
CX principles, each of which connects to between eight and 20 specific employee behaviors. This
has resulted in each employee feeling that the customer-centric behaviors they’re asked to adopt
are relevant to their role.
FIGURE 2 Intermediate IT Organizations Focus On Optimizing Customer Centricity
Identify and establish Institutionalize specific

principles of customer-centric customer-centric employee
behaviors behaviors
Siloed, but effective Remove barriers to

governance framework enterprisewide and
customer-centric governance
Recognize and celebrate Add enablers that make

customer-centric examples behavior change easier
Agile Organization Structures Set The Foundation For Adaptable IT Organizations
CIOs and other technology leaders have a mandate to improve the technology foundations and
innovations required to win, serve, and retain customers.8 CIOs that have reorganized or transformed
and attained a beginner level of IT transformation still exhibit low levels of agility. Those at the
intermediate level demonstrate hierarchical structures and focus on governance and capabilities to
enable agility and lay the foundation for an adaptive IT organization (see Figure 3). An intermediate IT
organization is characterized by:
›› Outcome-based governance, but with low collaboration and empowerment. Many beginner
IT organizations have institutionalized command and control governance even though it impedes
creativity and effective decision making. One approach to address these challenges is the adoption
of an outcome-based governance that gives leaders a better environment to invest wisely and
achieve the intended end-to-end outcomes.9
For example, during an interview with a CIO of a large US bank, they advised us they had
implemented an outcome-based governance framework that allows a constant flow of small
software changes to deliver and test business impact, discovering the best investment
opportunities. The funding of outcomes enabled them to dynamically adjust initiatives, iteratively
discovering and delivering solutions that match customer needs and expectations.
›› Sourcing specific capabilities from third parties. CIOs often build IT assets from the bottom
up, resulting in IT facing an uphill battle against legacy systems and outdated technologies.
This approach often impedes agility and drives up both capital expenditures and operating
costs. In addition, the increased shortage of skilled tech talent resulted in CIOs transforming
their organization to a subset of traditional IT capabilities. Beginner IT organizations focus on
identification and control of costs, rather than elaborate plans to reorganize or redefine capabilities.
Intermediate organizations have reduced IT capabilities by sourcing specific capabilities from third
parties — for example, consuming cloud capabilities from cloud providers, audit capabilities from
professional service firms, or research capabilities from boutique research firms.10
For example, a CIO from a US insurance firm told us it has a commercial relationship with a
company named CompoZed Labs that now handles 40% of its software development. In addition,
it uses Pivotal Cloud Foundry, a software workbench for building applications that can run on
the firm’s internal servers or on third-party public cloud infrastructure from the likes of Amazon,
Microsoft, or Google.
›› Agile delivery teams with fixed pools of human capital assets. Traditional IT structures have
mirrored business structures — they are based on grouping of skills and are functionally based
(e.g., business analysis, app dev, infrastructure, security, QA, and operations). As firms request
speed of delivery, many CIOs focused their transformations to align with products or service lines.
Intermediate IT organizations are cross-functional teams based on product, service, or customer,
and have reached a significant level of maturity in Agile delivery comprising fixed pools of human
capital assets, which are hard to reallocate on demand.
For example, a large Canadian bank created a role-agnostic taxonomy to help people understand
how different employees fit into cross-functional team. They label different team members as
“residents,” “subject matter experts,” and “guests,” which they source from fixed headcount.
FIGURE 3 Intermediate IT Organizations Focus On Work Efficiencies Agility
Outcome-based governance
Dysfunctional governance with low collaboration and
empowerment
Reduce technology
Traditional plan, build-run management capabilities by
capabilities sourcing specific capabilities
from third parties
Agile delivery, but have fixed

Low agility pools of human capital
assets
Intermediate Organizations Need To Be More Strategic

Intermediate organizations have overcome many of the challenges of the beginner phase. They’ve
moved beyond overwhelming operational overload with improved processes and automation and
have started recognizing the value of customer centricity. Still, while they’ve addressed the short-term
tactical issues, they often fail to use their employee and technology assets strategically, with a focus on
the long term. Specifically, they:
›› Control the business’ uses of technology without enabling it. Intermediate organizations create
secure, scalable, efficient capabilities by controlling how technology is used. This limits the ability
for the business to experiment on its own. Fidelity controls data through an internal data center
of excellence within the CIO’s team. It recognizes that this prevents abuses but also limits the
potential to use data to directly benefit customers.
›› Innovate through funding and processes, but largely for incremental improvements. Estee
Lauder uses architects as facilitators of innovation to connect sources with possible consumers.
This has made it highly innovative in areas of job scheduling, testing, and other internally oriented
areas. These innovations help the firm with operational excellence but don’t result in breakthrough
performance in a transforming organization.
›› Have basic skills for running IT but not the acumen for business breakthroughs. Organizations
are off to a good start if they build EX journey maps, learn software development, and identify rote
work they can eliminate. However, they’re still relatively disconnected from the business. Building on
these skills requires focusing on CX design, analytics, and mobile development. The back office and
systems of record are still important, but the emphasis must shift to customer-enabling technology.
›› Measure on impact but don’t customize metrics to motivate different groups. Boomers are
different from Millennials; CX designers from data center operators; and relationship managers from
apps leaders. Intermediate companies can translate customer metrics to IT metrics but are unable
to tune these to incent groups with different processes, scopes, and cultures.
Recommendations
The Mandate For Intermediate Organizations Is To Execute With Speed

Execution at the speed of customer engagement is the main goal of intermediate organizations. In the
beginner phase, interpersonal conflicts, bureaucratic processes, and disjointed tooling slow things
down. To advance, technology organizations must strive to overcome these challenges by focusing on
these key practices:
›› Redesign and automate for customer responsiveness, efficiency, and compliance. Technology
is moving too quickly for the business to ask how to use it. You need to get ahead of the business
in its use of technology to ensure that it uses new technologies in a secure and scalable way that
conforms to mandatory internal and external policies while meeting customer needs for speed.
Your team’s scope, structure, and skills must be assertive and close enough to the business to
suggest what technology can and can’t do for it.
›› Use external services strategically to enhance the internal innovation functions. Innovation
comes in many forms, and much of it falls outside your own teams. Keep the strategic innovation
in-house, and let your architecture, vendor management, and relationship management people
augment this strategic work with outside help. Establish an internal consulting function for areas
such as analytics, cloud, and Agile. Use these groups to increase the use and maturity of these
areas and guide businesspeople in how they should solve business problems. Finally, segment
external service providers to enable tech teams and the business to exploit the differentiating
capabilities of strategic providers while allocating nonstrategic providers to commodity functions.
›› Formalize skills and competencies around optimal EX and best practices. After establishing
EX journey maps, you need to optimize them. You can use best practices from CX journey mapping
to do this.11 Next, mold business processes around coding best practices: Create architectural
models for business transactions that flow from development to production; mandate the use of
collaboration tools for cross-silo engagement; and require security objectives at the architectural
level for every project. Finally, start to evangelize automation as a competitive differentiator. Your
competitors are already doing this, and automation will significantly increase in 2019.12
›› Develop incentives that foster discretionary effort in creative work. The purpose of incentives
is to foster desired behaviors, such as high levels of discretionary effort. Conventional incentives
like financial rewards, recognition, and performance reviews (extrinsic) can improve performance in
task-driven, repetitive work but aren’t going to deliver it in creative work that involves a great deal
of absorption, personal investment, complexity, and overall quality.13 To incentivize discretionary
effort in creative work is harder because what’s important to each person is different. However, a
great start is making sure that: 1) your people have a say in how the work gets done; 2) they have a
chance to learn in areas important to them; and 3) you connect their work to their passion or their
calling — what truly matters to them.14
›› Treat KPIs as outcomes rather than as a controlling force. The widespread practice of
setting numerical targets and using simplistic metrics to judge individual and group performance
undermines creativity and innovation. Numerical targets are an extrinsic motivator and are
detrimental to creativity because they imply to employees that there will be personal consequences
for failing to meet the metrics. It puts their sense of safety at risk and undermines their sense of
self-determination — both of which are psychologically necessary for creativity to grow and sustain
itself.15 On the other hand, when leaders look on metrics as a learning tool, they can use them to
find barriers to employees’ progress, and then take steps to break down these barriers, building
intrinsic motivation and nurture creativity.
Engage With An Analyst

Gain greater confidence in your decisions by working with Forrester thought leaders to apply
our research to your specific business and technology initiatives.
Analyst Inquiry Analyst Advisory Webinar
To help you put research Translate research into Join our online sessions
into practice, connect action by working with on the latest research
with an analyst to discuss an analyst on a specific affecting your business.
your questions in a engagement in the form Each call includes analyst
30-minute phone session of custom strategy Q&A and slides and is
— or opt for a response sessions, workshops, available on-demand.
via email. or speeches.
Learn more.
Learn more. Learn more.
Forrester’s research apps for iOS and Android.

Stay ahead of your competition no matter where you are.
Endnotes
Digital transformations are often hindered, rather than enabled by the IT organization because the transformation
1
initiatives expose legacy systems, the rigidity of the organization structure, and, the outmoded culture. See the
Forrester report “Maximize Business Value With Fast, Connected Technology.”
Forrester’s research into successful digital organizations found that CIOs had created cross-functional teams that
2
elevated digital business success. See the Forrester report “Use Cross-Functional Teams To Execute Digital Business
Strategy.”
Where IT organizations are assessing whether scaled agile or the Spotify model is right for them, they discover
3
collaboration is a key factor that impacts the success of agile delivery. See the Forrester report “Scaling Agile: Can The
Spotify Approach Work For You?”
See the Forrester report “Gig Workers Fill A Gap In Your Tech Talent Strategy.”
4
Forrester’s research into successful digital organizations found that successful firms build an outside-in customer-
5
obsessed culture, with enterprisewide collaboration and a strong focus on customer outcomes. See the Forrester
report “Accelerate Your Culture Practices For Digital Transformation.”
Firms that have acquired a mature or advanced level of customer centricity have realigned their firms to not only
6
reinforce customer centricity, but also build practices to help identify a never-ending stream of emergent employee
behaviors. See the Forrester report “Three Culture Practices For Long-Term Customer Centricity.”
To move beyond intermediate transformation, CIOs must move on to advancing their culture transformation by making
7
customer-centric behavior adoption a probability, not just a possibility. See the Forrester report “Remove Barriers And
Add Enablers For A Customer-Centric Culture.”
With the focus on costs and agility, Forrester has seen an unbundling of technology management capabilities.
8
Whereas CIOs have created cross-functional teams, those with advanced IT transformation have democratized trust
in the outside world in return for speed, inspiration, and access to capabilities they can’t, or don’t want to, develop
internally. See the Forrester report “Embrace Next-Generation Digital Organization Structures.”
Firms undertaking a transformation to meet the needs of a changing business model, need to focus on agility of
9
decision making. See the Forrester report “Adopt Agile, End-To-End Technology Governance.”
10
See the Forrester report “Cloud Services Accelerate Your Pursuit Of Customer Obsession.”
11
To learn how to leverage CX to improve EX, see the Forrester report “Focus On Employees’ Daily Journeys To Improve
Employee Experience.”
12
Automation is impacting the workforce of the future. See the Forrester report “Predictions 2019: Automation.”
13
Source: Christopher P. Cerasoli, Jessica M. Nicklin, and Michael T. Ford, “Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives
jointly predict performance: A 40-year meta-analysis,” APA PsycNET, July 2014 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0035661).
14
Source: Teresa M. Amabile and Michael G. Pratt, “The dynamic componential model of creativity and innovation
in organizations: Making progress, making meaning,” Research in Organizational Behavior, 2016 (https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.riob.2016.10.001).
15
Source: Teresa M. Amabile and Michael G. Pratt, “The dynamic componential model of creativity and innovation
in organizations: Making progress, making meaning,” Research in Organizational Behavior, 2016 (https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.riob.2016.10.001).
We work with business and technology leaders to develop
customer-obsessed strategies that drive growth.
Products and Services
›› Core research and tools
›› Data and analytics
›› Peer collaboration
›› Analyst engagement
›› Consulting
›› Events
Forrester’s research and insights are tailored to your role and

critical business initiatives.
Roles We Serve
Marketing & Strategy Technology Management Technology Industry
Professionals Professionals Professionals
CMO ›› CIO Analyst Relations
B2B Marketing Application Development
B2C Marketing & Delivery
Customer Experience Enterprise Architecture
Customer Insights Infrastructure & Operations
eBusiness & Channel Security & Risk
Strategy Sourcing & Vendor
Management
Client support
For information on hard-copy or electronic reprints, please contact Client Support at
+1 866-367-7378, +1 617-613-5730, or clientsupport@forrester.com. We offer quantity
discounts and special pricing for academic and nonprofit institutions.
Forrester Research (Nasdaq: FORR) is one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world. We work with
business and technology leaders to develop customer-obsessed strategies that drive growth. Through proprietary
research, data, custom consulting, exclusive executive peer groups, and events, the Forrester experience is about a
singular and powerful purpose: to challenge the thinking of our clients to help them lead change in their organizations.
For more information, visit forrester.com. 140372

Technologists and The Business Must Execute at The Speed of DevOps

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Technologists and The Business Must Execute at The Speed of DevOps

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Licensed for individual use only

Technologists — And The Business — Must

Why Read This Report Key Takeaways

Technologists — And The Business — Must Execute At The Speed

Table Of Contents Related Research Documents

8 The Mandate For Intermediate Organizations

Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA

The Foundation Of An Adaptable IT Organization Is Customer Centricity

Skilled Workers That Collaborate Are Key To Customer-Centric IT Organizations

›› Strong business and IT collaboration, with clear delineation of responsibilities. In an IT

›› Job-centric training for employees to enable IT to implement new technologies. Employee

FIGURE 1 Intermediate IT Organizations Focus On Optimizing Work Effort

Strong collaboration between

In-house and contractor, seek Utilize the gig economy to

Provide job-centric training to

›› Institutionalization of specific customer-centric employee behaviors. Customer centricity is

›› Implementation of enablers that make behavior change easier. Communicating behavioral

FIGURE 2 Intermediate IT Organizations Focus On Optimizing Customer Centricity

Identify and establish Institutionalize specific

Siloed, but effective Remove barriers to

Recognize and celebrate Add enablers that make

Agile Organization Structures Set The Foundation For Adaptable IT Organizations

FIGURE 3 Intermediate IT Organizations Focus On Work Efficiencies Agility

Agile delivery, but have fixed

Intermediate Organizations Need To Be More Strategic

The Mandate For Intermediate Organizations Is To Execute With Speed

Engage With An Analyst

Analyst Inquiry Analyst Advisory Webinar

Forrester’s research apps for iOS and Android.

Forrester’s research and insights are tailored to your role and

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen