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Sourcing for DevOps: Why not use the expertise of a Supplier as gamechanger?

Agile has been around for 20 years, not only for IT development but the principles of the Agile manifesto have evolved into management practices that transform organizations into entrepreneurs. These modern people-centric practices are embraced by many people in organizations and are eminent in creating new energy. 

Entrepreneurship today means People leveraging Technology
Besides human creativity, the other driver for innovative entrepreneurship is Technology. New Technology and new use of existing Technology fuels change. Interestingly enough we see that new Technology has enormous promises, but existing Technology hampers the desired change. 

So, for effective entrepreneurship managing Technology and delivering Technology solutions is just as important as human creativity. And where entrepreneurship remains a core competency of the organization, IT services suppliers are the specialists in managing Technology. IT services suppliers, Systems integrators if you wish, have been successful for decades in keeping systems and processes stable and reliable, while enabling the business to change. 

Delivering Change is key over Designing change 
Today a core competency of modern Systems Integrators is delivering the change for Technology and accelerating the change for the organization. Technology change means getting exponentially more flexible as well as increasing the end-to-end reliability of systems: DevOps. 

It is a learning curve leading to instant maturity. The strategic imperative is to climb the learning curve faster and better than the competition. We see today that in the battle for DevOps maturity, it is common to experiment with a diverse set of teams and models. And that the businesses that started the learning curve for many years already are the IT services suppliers. 

Six models for sourcing for DevOps 
In general, we see six models for the co-operation between customers and IT services suppliers emerge in the market. By choosing a particular model, customers can customize the way they leverage the expertise of an IT Services supplier in their Agile DevOps journey. These models are:

1. Use specialist staff of the IT services supplier (DevOps engineers) in the particular technology areas in the teams of the customer. This provides an entry into DevOps with the traditional teams 
2. Use Operations managers from the IT services supplier in the DevOps teams that have integral insight and responsibility for the operations chain. In this way, all operations and infrastructure services provided by the Supplier are represented in the DevOps team
3. The IT services supplier provides the platform to support the Dev Teams. A far more mature model in which the supplier provides an Operations platform that brings compute and storage components, standards, security and connectivity
4. The IT services supplier provides a consumable service catalogue. Very flexible and suited for diversified IT organizations. The services that compose the platform, as well as the legacy infrastructure and clouds, are broken up into components, offered and managed by the supplier to the DevOps teams 
5. Vertically integrated teams per domain, managed by the supplier. In this integral model, the supplier takes all responsibility for the applications, infrastructure and data management for a particular business domain. Product ownership resides with the customer or could in some cases be included in the teams of the supplier. 
6. The IT services supplier executes an application assessment and develops the application roadmap for transition to the cloud together with the DevOps implementation of the applications/domains within their area of responsibility. This is an effective model for maturely governed organizations. Starting at the applications and projecting the path towards renewed more flexible applications including the operations service of the supplier

The urgency
Today we see that the Covid-19 situation has led to a re-set of the digital initiatives for many organizations. Plans that were put on hold last year have been stopped or are redefined and the ones that remain are being put to action in 2021. All forms of Agile DevOps are common, change execution is the game and the modern IT service suppliers are the base players in the teams. So why not use them as a gamechanger to climb the learning curve.