Written by Craig Nielsen, VP, APAC at GitLab.
Business innovation in Australia is a national imperative according to the Digital Technology Taskforce, with a goal to become a leading digital economy and society by 2030. But we are falling short. Australia’s place on the Global Innovation Index dropped two places in 2020 and has remained at 25th for two years in a row.
This survey also ranked Australia 5th on Human Capital and Research but 35th globally on Knowledge and Technological Outputs. There’s a clear opportunity to deliver more with the strong human capital potential in Australia.
To realise this ambition, there are two primary questions Australian organisations must consider when determining how to differentiate in a competitive market: How do we improve our value streams for our supply chains, production and customer experience, and more importantly, how fast can we deliver it?
The companies that are successful in the digital innovation race will be those that innovate faster to live up to the rapidly changing expectations of their customers.
To be competitive in the current market and provide customers with excellent digital experiences, organisations face a difficult choice between modernising their existing applications or integrating with costly legacy solutions.
McKinsey research reveals that 70 percent of the top economic performers, compared with just half of their contemporaries, are using their own software to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
By developing customised software, organisations can ensure that all digital experiences are constantly improving, leading to better customer outcomes, and improved employee satisfaction– and ultimately, a stronger competitive edge in today’s evolving landscape.
However, building a software factory requires investment in processes and technologies that help teams deliver, secure, and deploy software faster without compromising quality.
The 2023 Global DevSecOps Survey found that agile and efficient organisations share common practices to be more productive and efficient to meet the increasing expectations of speed while maintaining software stability and usability.
Here are four main best practices that help organisations release software faster and deploy more frequently:
1. Run Applications in the Cloud
As organisations move to a cloud-native approach for software development, they will need to adopt technologies that allow them to leverage platform services in the cloud while keeping security top of mind throughout the development process.
GitLab’s survey findings underscored the benefit of deploying to the cloud in increasing development velocity.
Respondents with at least a quarter of their applications in the cloud were 2.2 times more likely to be releasing software faster than they were a year ago — and respondents with at least half of their applications in the cloud were 4.2 times more likely to deploy to production multiple times per day.
While the responses recognised the positive value of the cloud, they also acknowledged the complexities cloud computing can bring to software development.
2. Integrate Business Functions with DevSecOps
Though DevOps and DevSecOps mostly steal the show in terms of methodologies, some organisations go a step further and practice BizDevOps — that is, incorporating business teams alongside development, security, and operations teams.
As software becomes more complex and significant, it’s critical that technical teams working within development, operations, and security functions are in close collaboration with business stakeholders.
This approach appears to be paying off for some: Respondents whose organisations practice BizDevOps were 1.4 times more likely to be releasing software faster than they were a year ago.
Strong leadership sets the tone for effective team collaboration.
By actively supporting their teams and determining processes that hinder success, IT leaders can understand areas of the workflow that impact velocity and make necessary adjustments.
3. Automate Software Delivery
Although CI/CD can improve efficiency, the findings also identified some challenges, including management’s limited understanding of CI/CD with its underpinnings to overall change management strategies and the companies’ hesitation to spend on tools that can help increase their developers’ productivity.
They underscore the value of investing in tools that unify CI/CD with other DevSecOps practices—such as incorporating security early in the development process and creating tighter feedback loops—to help organisations break down development silos.
Automating the software development lifecycle with CI/CD can help teams release software faster and more efficiently.
The survey shows that respondents practicing CI/CD were twice as likely to deploy multiple times per day and 1.2 times more likely to release software faster than they did a year ago.
4. Leveraging value stream management
The survey findings also revealed that organisations that make a conscious effort to track key development metrics are more likely to improve them. Value stream management tooling leverages metrics, analytics, and dashboards that can help organisations visualise their software development work streams from ideation to customer delivery, and ensure that each function is delivering value as efficiently as possible.
This birds-eye view makes it easy for leaders to track how well different functions are maximising their value to the business, measure cycle time for software delivery, surface and course-correct issues and inefficiencies before they escalate, and benchmark these figures against competitors.
The race is on for Australia to become a serious contender in global innovation. Leaders must realise that faster software delivery is a necessity in order to compete in the global market.
Only by improving speed to innovation can we unlock our true potential as a digital economy.
