What if your organization could radically streamline digital processes so an update that usually takes six weeks and 50 people could be completed in just five minutes by one person? BCG helps large, complex organizations learn how to accomplish exactly that with DevOps.
DevOps unites business leaders, developers, and IT operations staff in cross-functional, agile teams to transform software delivery by focusing on high levels of technology automation and collaboration. In our experience, DevOps at scale has helped companies reduce software defects by up to 70%, release new code 100 to 200 times more frequently, and get products to market two to four times faster. Companies that have combined DevOps with a standardized and fully virtualized infrastructure have seen IT costs drop by as much as 30%. Such results translate into a crucial benefit: sustainable competitive advantage.
DevOps is a foundational capability to achieve digital ambitions and, therefore, an intrinsic part of becoming agile at scale, getting value from investments in data and digital platforms, and ultimately modernizing the technology function. To put it succinctly, the most ambitious digital initiatives—from scaling up agile and AI to becoming bionic—will fail to thrive without DevOps.
Implementing DevOps locally is relatively simple, but scaling DevOps across all parts of the organization, in complex environments, is a much more daunting task. BCG has delivered hundreds of DevOps projects across a variety of industries—and we understand how to scale DevOps in ways that generate maximum productivity and value for the business. Our DevOps consultants also partner with leading technology companies and cloud providers to deliver the most cutting-edge solutions.
Our DevOps offering builds seven core capabilities, including diagnostics, implementation, and scaling up.
BCG’s proprietary benchmarking evaluates how your IT organization compares with those of your peers. It measures your organization’s readiness for DevOps and agile at scale, identifies capability gaps, and details the best path forward.
Based on benchmarking results, we can help you develop a high-level business case for agile DevOps. In addition to quantifying the gains that DevOps at scale can deliver, we assess the business tradeoffs among agility, cost, and quality.
BCG helps you design and pilot a unique target operating model and build cross-functional teams that focus on reducing inefficiencies. During this process, we identify the need for DevOps deep dives, such as DevSecOps, AI operations, DevOps in complex enterprise resource planning environments, DevOps in data, site reliability engineer deployments, and no operations (NoOps).
BCG helps you assess and benchmark all the DevOps tools available so that you select the ones best suited to your unique organization. Tailoring your toolkit ensures that all your tools work in harmony with one another and with your company’s business capabilities, as well as your existing technology, applications, and DevOps infrastructure–covering the full life cycle of software development.
We not only showcase DevOps in small pilots as proof of concept, we also work together with your teams to manage and drive large-scale implementation projects. By integrating projects at all levels and enabling teams on the ground, companies create immediate impact, promote continuous learning, and build a proven DevOps culture.
After DevOps at scale has been deployed, BCG’s dashboard closely monitors the performance of—and opportunities for further improvements in—the technology architecture, software, and DevOps team. Working collaboratively, we continue to evolve the DevOps platform and ensure that you can roll out the approach across your organization.
Our DevOps consultants coach employees to develop the skills and capabilities needed to drive progress in key areas, such as improving their DevOps toolchain setup, adopting SRE principles, defining architecture roadmaps to improve modularization and decoupling (for example, by deploying microservices and other modern architecture patterns), and propagating security design principles across the software development life cycle.
BCG's experience covers the DevOps spectrum, from full transformation to hands-on delivery support. For example:
In order to optimize utilization and increase efficiency, DB Netz digitized one of its major manual processes: creating a timetable for booking infrastructure routes. With BCG’s support, DB Netz launched a large-scale agile implementation project using DevOps. The project, which involved more than 250 team members, achieved a 70% reduction in system downtime and a 50% improvement in code quality.
With fintechs and other new players disrupting the financial-services sector, traditional institutions need to be faster and more flexible than ever before. ING Netherlands is one bank that responded to the new market dynamics by adopting agile practices, completely changing the way it works.
Our DevOps consultants and industry experts help clients streamline their digital processes and achieve their digital ambitions. Here are some of our experts on this topic.
Agile software development takes you only so far. To keep pace in the digital age, you also need DevOps.
Agile methodologies are paying big dividends for companies. DevOps is a set of complementary practices that can boost returns still more.
HSBC’s David Knott looks for ways to streamline the bank’s digital infrastructure, adopting new technology and new ways of thinking in the digital world.
Companies that adopt agile ways of working, in combination with DevOps, can significantly lower IT costs and deliver higher-quality software than ever before.
DevSecOps ensures that Cybersecurity is not an afterthought in your agile development process. Learn how BCG and BCG Platinion can help enabling your DevOps teams to systematically integrate security aspects to reduce rework and produce mature solutions with a shorter time-to-market.
