IT Governance Mechanisms for DevOps Teams - How Incumbent Companies Achieve Competitive Advantages

Abstract

More and more organizations are deciding to move from traditional, plan-driven software development to agile approaches in order to stay competitive. Therefore, the IT functions have been deciding to implement cross-functional DevOps teams. To enable collaboration within DevOps teams, incumbent companies have to implement mechanisms to govern dynamic and agile environments. The present research investigates which IT governance mechanisms are helpful for the implementation of DevOps teams. For this purpose, we conducted a qualitative research study and interviewed team members in six companies that have already implemented DevOps-oriented teams. We describe which IT governance mechanisms-in the form of structure, processes, and relational mechanisms-are important for DevOps teams to achieve competitive advantages. Our findings show that agile roles and responsibilities, hybrid or decentralized organizational structures, as well as communications and knowledge-sharing models are conducive to the government of a DevOps team.

SKI: A New Agile Framework that Supports DevOps, Continuous Delivery, and Lean Hypothesis Testing

“…Hence, DevOps/CD is a development paradigm that enables continuous delivery and support via a set of well-defined processes. DevOps/CD is a growing practice in organizations ranging from Amazon to Spotify [4]. Several studies have noted the potential benefits of DevOps/CD.…”

“…For example, it enables teams to continuously track the current build state of the software, reduce integration and configuration errors, lower stress when dealing with releases, increase deployment flexibility and provides improved team collaboration [1,5]. More generally, it has been noted that DevOps/CD speeds up decisionmaking processes and helps teams meet the demands found in rapid changing environments [4].…”

“…These technical challenges are starting to be resolved via techniques such as containerization [8]. Teams have also struggled to leverage DevOps/CD due to the lack of a well-defined process framework that effectively supports DevOps/CD [4].…”

IT Governance and Its Agile Dimensions

“…In the last decade, the deployment of information technology (IT) has become crucial for helping enterprises adopt digital innovations as developed by startups and big players [1]. Increasingly, organizations are deciding to move from traditional, plan-driven software development to agile approaches to stay competitive [2]. Yet it is of paramount importance that organizations undertake proper governance of the IT setting and processes to address fundamental changes [3].…”

“…The focus of this practice-oriented research is relatively new, and research on how organizations are effectively implementing agile ITG dimensions in Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences | 2019 URI: https://hdl.handle.net/10125/60055 ISBN: 978-0-9981331-2-6 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) day-to-day practice is rather scarce. Although several research projects have focused on implementation of single agile strategies within an ITG framework [2,22], limited research has examined agile ITG dimension on a holistic level. To address this gap, we pose the following research question (RQ): How are organizations implementing agile ITG?…”