DevOps Value Chain for SAP Estate

      DevOps value chain for SAP Estate will comprise of all tools and automation framework that come into play for the operations and the projects. For any DevOps landscape to be successful, we need a set of basic rules that will need to be adhered to. To regulate these rule-sets, it is thus important to structure the IT Estate in a process structure so that a microscopic study or a bottom up approach can be done. In this write-up we will evaluate the various DevOps process areas. Although DevOps is technology agnostic, we will also see some of the tool-sets that come from SAP stable mapped to them. Do read my earlier post on DevOps in an 21st Century Enterprise IT Estate.

      The above representation shows the framework of DevOps with respect to its IT Estate and Users. The IT service for an IT estate for an enterprise will change with focus being on user empathy and  user personas, bringing the digital experience. The user is any person or process that is serviced by the IT infrastructure. DevOps will bundle the framework of methodology, value chain and tools. An IT estate will have applications that ranges from systems of records, that may require changes in a year, to digital collaborative platform that need respond to change almost real time based on user sentiments. While your system of records for finance & inventory may be working for years as intended, your digital platform like a marketing portal may need to production a change in minuets. Thus we will need to have the DevOps framework support these diverse demand of continuous deployment, at the speed demanded by each of these processes. Similarly a request for change in a decision support systems cannot wait for the next release, as the change is a tangible benefit for the user and should not be delayed. For an user, it could be a customer or your internal business or your operations or your partners, the governance and tools around your change process should be transparent. They are concerned on the service fulfillment, a seamless experience and a validated solution. DevOps intends to adapt the enterprise into this change where it lays between the IT Estate and its users, transparently. DevOps will be looking at its tool sets as individual micro service versus a silo application. It do not talk of discarding your existing investment in tools and process, but re-engineering the existing as a service feature and identify the white and grey spaces that needs to be completed. Thus every IT process will be a series of links of micro service that will have its internal controls meeting the overall IT process indices.

      The DevOps value chain is the series of functions that IT performs to add value to a business service. The Architecture breaks down the functions in the DevOps Value Chain into 4 key control points for any DevOps model. DevOps must monitor and control to manage the incorporated service or micro-service through its life cycle, in the desired speed and direction.

      Each DevOps value chain is centred on an essential and integral element of IT project and delivery framework. Together, the four value streams play a vital role in helping IT holistically manage the full IT service life cycle. They fall under the process stream as seen in the DevOps Blossom, namely Ideate To Launch ( I₂L ), Requirement To Deploy ( R₂D ), Run To Optimize ( R₂O ), end Detect To Correct ( D₂C ). We will explore each of these value streams.

Ideate To Launch ( I₂L ) Value Stream

      This caters to requests from the business to develops the service model to cater the requested service. This stream plays the role of a bridge between business and IT. It safeguards business interest, sets the IT context to the requirement and frame the service model. A holistic IT portfolio view across IT PMO, enterprise architecture and service portfolio management gives an accurate picture of IT business demands. Help IT maintain control of the governance of this service delivery and be able to track and measure performance,

costs, quality, and on-time delivery. This stream help ideation to bring the human centric design approach, process re-engineering and finding the ‘new normal’ which every business needs to continuously discover. Innovation needs to co-exist with delivery, and accounted for betterment of business services. This value stream safeguards the traditional approach of process centricity with industry led best practices, while adapting the new thinking of human empathy through user centric design. Digital transformation is all about starting from the end, transform the human experience. While the core remains the 80-90% industry led best practice, the 10-20% of time and effort that will go in building the user experience is going to differentiate the business among its peer. This Value Chain consist of Portfolio & Program Management, Digital User Experience & Process Engineering.

  

Requirement To Deploy ( R₂D ) Value Stream:

      This caters to the services around requirements whether as a new business projects, enhancing existing solutions or requesting development of enhanced features in existing products or services. Traditionally this cater to the execution of IT projects, whether it is new implementation, system integrations, change requests, transformations, landscape consolidation and its types. This is the ‘Build As A Factory’ side of the house. With the changing SAP IT Estates, this stream plays the crucial role of ‘omni-speed’ IT that needs to cater to the needs of the traditional water fall based delivery to the needs of lean & agile delivery and everything in between. This phase explores the possibilities of ‘Shift Left’, use of ‘Factory Services’, ‘Integrated Change Management’ that orchestrates the value of continuous delivery with a quick turnaround to market. Make delivery predictable in a distributed environment and providing the right sets of collaborative tools, using the right planning and tracking techniques, referring the common set of data and standardizing delivery. It also supports the various factory models for realization based on the 3 ‘V’s of Verity, Volume & Volatility for development, testing, configuration, administrative, training and transition to support services. This value chain consists of Discover, Prepare, Explore, Realize & Deploy.

  

Run To Optimize ( R₂O ) Value Stream:

      This caters to the needs of operations to Keep System Running, able to meet dynamic business changes while ensuring the lights are on. This is the ‘Run As A Factory’ side of the house. This stream is responsible for transition of services to production and making them consumable by the business & users. It coordinates the testing and release approvals. As part of the stream responsible for smooth run across the competing demands of various business and application needs, it need to push the peddle around continuous improvements. Running improvement initiatives by automation or by optimization of services. Tracking service requests from business, projects & break-fix, managing an integrated IT calendar for both run & build side of the house, bringing the competing & many time working in silo teams together, building the desirable change cycle strategies, change approval and deployment are some of the key activities of this stream. Service orchestration or service brokerage is integral to this scenario. Landscape complexities have increased in a hybrid scenario with in-premise and ever-increasing service based models using cloud for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Thus, it is important to track the life cycle of a service delivered to consumer. This value chain consists of Service Operations, Change Management, Automation & Optimize.

Detect To Correct ( D₂C ) Value Stream:

      This caters to the granular services to run side of the business, focusing on some important services essential in the maintenance and support of the IT estate; that calls for it to be treated and given the importance as a separate stream of study from Run To Optimize (R₂O) stream. This stream looks into maintenance and health of the applications and its underlying infrastructure and platforms by integration of the monitoring, event, incident, problem, change, configuration management and remediation tasks in IT operations. It also looks into the security, access and compliance. It handles the critical component of incident management and problem management. It focuses on improving the speed at which issues with a business service are identified, including proactive identification before service impact is acute. Analytics of data points to mine information in system stability, process stability and predictive analytics. This data point will help further study into autonomic and machine learning, self-healing, creating insights. Root Cause Analysis (RCA) supported by the analytics will drive the principle of corrective action, and following it through execution. Development of sustainable and living best source of help with support of self-service solution, standard operating procedure and guided execution will shift left the services of support, reducing the ticket volumes and transactions. This value chain consists of Monitor, Secure, Incident, Problem, Analytics & Correct.

      The figure above, shows an integrated process area under DevOps. A rough glance will show that this is compatible with the IT Service Management (ITSM) engaging all the standard areas of Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). It also encompasses project management process, innovation framework, application lifecycle management, development and maintenance. Also this links the enabling platform for innovations, like design thinking for design, analytics, process engineering etc. It also integrates a process for automation, optimization and analytics. Thus this not only covers toolsets necessary for today, but also encompasses what is required for the future. Understanding this allows you to introduce organizational changes, design & build methodologies (e.g. Agile, Activate), DevOps value chain, Continuous delivery & testing, system integration etc. Let us study of the processes.

                                              

      The diagram in figure above shows the standard SAP products mapped that can support various DevOps process areas. They have overlapping functionalities. Although we have many tools and products that are available from partners and 3^rd parties, we have restricted this mapping in the figure to some of the popular SAP products that maps in. This is a representative chart and is not exhaustive. If one studies it in details, we may find that we already have many of the products in our IT Estate, and we may have used them extensively, partially or not evaluates at all. Thus this is going to help us with our initial tools mapping into DevOps processes.

      The DevOps value chain for SAP improving time to market and efficiency through better ways of orchestration and automation applying across Information Technology, Business Technology and Service Operations layers. The Orchestration building blocks are Connect, Integrate, Consume and Analyze. Efficiency is achieved by creating a Connection layer for all Technology Service, Business Service, Smart Asset Service feeds for creating foundation of XaaS. This involves Integrating all Service Components layers across Tech, Business, Ops Services leveraging API, BPM Workflow, Data with full Service Lifecycle Management. Create Service Catalog, Service Portfolio across all services and provide a unified service consumption layer for enabling ServiceXchange via Service Marketplace. Service Operations across Lifecycle Analytics including Service Economics and Integrated Service Level Management, and moving away from Silos.

Study of use cases from DevOps value chain.

User centric design in Ideate To Launch (I₂L)

      Traditional business process blueprinting would encompass study of current process, study of system, identification of gaps, scope the customization, define the measures and document the same. Even though it goes thru multiple iteration and sign off, we generally land up in a situation where the user is unhappy, the solution while it works, provide much to be desired by the user. In an IT estate, we seldom design for the user, but for the business process. Bringing user centric design for enterprise application inverts the pyramid. It brings the user experience in the centre of the design. The key here is to package process and design as both are important. Design focus should be on strategic personas and rest should adopt the best practices and follow standards. With simplification and automation being a design tenant, we need a tool that supports such design approach. DevOps process area of Ideate To Lunch (I₂L) brings in tool sets that integrates tool-sets that specializes phased lifecycles and agile lifecycles tools and testing suits to bring in an integrated build tool chain. It brings in a governance methodology and reporting, over an integrated data store for monitor and control. The user of an IT Estate is anyone who consumes its services. Thus when we change the design approach from process driven to user centricity, it will make the IT enabled for a digital

Shift Left in Requirement To Deploy (R₂D)

     Traditional Enterprise Applications including SAP software development lifecycle is a linear phase-gate or waterfall process, that include stages: plan, design, build, test and deploy. Defects thus are identified late in the life cycle, and valuable time is wasted debating, fixing testing and transporting the changes. For non-functional defects such as architecture design, security, workload performance, availability, integration orchestration etc. becomes very expensive and time-consuming and sometimes difficult to change. This adds to unpredictability and put pressure on project schedule and cost, asking for frustration and firefights. In DevOps process area of Requirement To Deploy (R₂D) we re-look at this model, and rather than taking a phased approach, we look at engaging these hot buttons like security, testing, interface testing be delivered in small in small batches throughout the project lifecycle. This idea is also known as shifting left. In SAP, the quick wins are in areas of security integration, test management, continuous integration, shorter deployment cycles. When we shift left, fewer things break in production or later phase of the project. Issues are detected and resolved early. The key driver is to enable project leaders to decompose work structures into small batches, and having a workflow to trace and track progress through the software development cycle. DevOps bring in the best fit tools for planning, design and tracking in the same platform.

Omni speed change & release in Run To Optimize (R₂O)

     Omni-speed IT mandates a re-look at an enterprise change management process and re-engineer it to accommodate the speed to market changes for various applications in the IT Estate. In DevOps process area of Run To Optimize (R2O) we re-look at this model, and propose a road map to adapt to the new. Change could come from business change requests, project execution, incident and problem management. In the new order every change get mapped into an IT requirement that once approved gets converted to change documentation of requirement specification and solution documentation. The new here would be the revamped change approval board who will be empowered to orchestrate every change that goes into the IT Estate or has potential to impact the user. This change board will tie each change to a calendar item associated with every possible cycles. There will be tools to ensure that automated change impact analysis, test validation and approval takes place with minimal human interventions. The change advisory board would thus be and paneled group of elders who defines the Key Indices under which the process will perform. Thus reducing the human involvement in approval process itself, but focus on more value added change impact management and speed to change. As part of the teams working on these changes, either they are from projects or from support, the teams will need to adapt to the new ways. The demand of Verity, Volume & Volatility will decide the need for a shared service / factory model, versus distributed teams. This ensures higher utilization, greater productivity, knowledge retention and re-usability. This forces better communication or lesser communication gaps between various factories and within each units. Factories will ensure quality through proper gating when a service is requested and at the time of delivery. Thus DevOps will bring in an enterprise wide change with shift left, autonomous frameworks of tools & processes, integration of people process, renewed focus on monitoring & control, governance leading to a complete re-engineering of how IT works today. Thus, DevOps focuses on adapting best fit tools, delivery models, automation and deployment efficiency required by a 21st century IT estate.

In my next article, we will discuss more details around a method for identification for Automation Approach for a SAP Estate.

About the author: Trijoy Saikia is an Enterprise Architect having 16+ years of experience in IT across chemical, natural resources vertical domain and working experience in mills and process industry. He has worked on complex SAP landscape in various capacities in outsourcing, system integration and transformation projects. He has experience working on large multi geography landscape transformation related to acquisition and spin-off, including managing integration, transition, rebadging and handling sensitivities. He has been in roles with accountability in Delivery, Financials, Customer Satisfaction for Service Management and Service Delivery across SAP and non-SAP applications. He is involved in roles across technology – design, integration, IT transformation, technology architecture, project management, mobilizations, and change management. He has contribution to pre-sales, solution architecting, service management, mobilization, transformation and delivery roles. He is involved in building capabilities in technology architecture. Have co-authored white papers, leads innovations and has built capabilities in SAP Architecture, Administration, Security, Integration and Shop-Floor Technologies. He is a Computer Engineer by education, and hails from Assam in India. He has worked with Accenture and Patni Computers Systems prior to joining HCLin 2014.He is is a Director in SAP Service line. He can be connected at trijoy.s@hcl.com