Challenges as Regards Aligning IT and Business with Agility When Applying the BizDevOps Approach

Challenges as Regards Aligning IT and Business with Agility When Applying the BizDevOps Approach

연구 분야: Software Development

학회: International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

BizDevOps is an extension of the DevOps approach, which incorporates a business cycle involving non-IT stakeholders in order to achieve IT/business alignment and meet organizational needs. However, this new cycle may run the risk of losing agility. While the development and operations cycles of DevOps are inherently agile, the lack of agility in the business cycle can create bottlenecks, thus compromising overall software lifecycle agility. This work addresses the relevance of this problem, analyzes the associated difficulties, and proposes potential solutions. The difficulties identified encompass stakeholders, processes, information and resources. A promising solution involves leveraging Enterprise Architecture enriched with agile practices defined in the latest version (10) of the TOGAF industrial standard. These practices make it possible to describe the entire organization, including the alignment relationships between business elements and system and IT elements. Furthermore, the incorporation of continuous engineering activities into BizDevOps, such as continuous planning and continuous budgeting, could improve IT/business alignment. Moreover, the use of ‘business capabilities’ as a technique with which to assess abilities and align objectives is essential. This is because it allows the specification of the elements required in order to achieve a specific purpose or expected outcome for the organization, such as developing software while ensuring the alignment of IT with the business. The proposed solutions have the objective of overcoming alignment challenges in BizDevOps by addressing stakeholder involvement, process optimization, information flow and resource allocation. The study emphasizes the importance of IT/business alignment in software development projects and suggests that agile enterprise architecture practices should effectively tackle this challenge within the context of BizDevOps.