3 Reasons Why Government Agencies Need to Use DevOps

Living in the digital age comes with the expectation that we can easily get things done. If you need your dress shirt to be pressed for an important event in the evening, you can get same-day service. If you have back to back meetings and forgot to pack lunch, you can have Uber Eats deliver you a meal. If you run out of dog food and don’t have enough time to run to the store, you can place an order via Amazon Prime Now and have it delivered to your door in two hours. This list can go on and on.

This expectation to complete tasks at a fast pace also applies to your digital experience. In today’s age of continuous improvement to deliver optimal user experiences for your customers, DevOps addresses the fundamental need for constant agility to deliver features, changes, and fixes to your software. By integrating software developers, quality control, security engineers and IT operations, DevOps provides a platform for new software and fixes to be deployed into production as quickly as it is coded and tested. Here are three reasons why government agencies need to use DevOps in their digital experience.

DevOps is meant to include a set of efficiency and improvement principles that should minimize project development conflict and eliminate stress and burnout. In turn, team members will ideally be more healthy, loyal to the organization, and deeply engaged in workplace activities. It’s possible to measure across several key cultural indicators like sentiment toward change, failure, and a typical day’s work.

One of the most telling metrics is cross-skilling. When looking at cross-skilling, you should ask, “How much knowledge sharing and pairing exists among teams?” One way to assess that is to track if there’s a high variance in the velocity across Agile teams, especially knowing that team members are being shuffled. You’ll find that to gauge the impact and effectiveness of cultural changes, you need to establish a means for constant feedback and dialogue with the team.

Continuous delivery allows for the delivery of incremental or small changes quickly and continually as they go through the pipeline. This not only helps distribute microfeatures more rapidly, but also reduces the risk of a large release failing. It’s important to note that not all microfeatures that go to production will be seen by users. These features or fixes might be part of the production version, but potentially “turned off” for a period because you want to have specific changes validated as part of a build, even though the organization is not necessarily ready to install them on end-user systems.

Additionally, security monitoring reduces security and compliance risk through automation. Security configuration management, vulnerability management, and intelligence to detect attacks and breaches before they do serious damage are achieved through continuous monitoring.

One of the principles of DevOps is to shorten the time between code commit and code deploy. There are typically multiple gates that must be passed through before deploying software changes into production to ensure the integrity of the system. Most of these steps can be automated to reduce deployment time, as well as to improve quality.

Another DevOps principle that helps improve quality is minimizing coordination to deploy releases. Ironically, in a DevOps implementation, it’s essential to minimize the formal communications channels between each group. Instead, it’s important to establish a culture of shared responsibilities, ongoing interaction, and shared knowledge of every aspect of the project and the automated repeatable processes among all teams. Maximizing transparency enhances efficiency and quality, while also reducing the need for constant forced communications.

According to our Rise of the Digital Citizen Study with IPSOS, people’s expectations of the government are at an all-time high today. It’s no doubt that in this digital age, people expect to be able to engage with the government via digital channels, whether that’s through their website, online support, email, or social media. DevOps can help ensure that government agencies are reducing risk, increasing velocity, and improving quality, therefore leading citizens to be able to have user-friendly digital interactions with the government.