Any organization looking to deliver quality software rapidly and reliably needs to care about DevOps. Companies that have adopted DevOps principles are disrupting industries, innovating faster and leaving their competitors in the dust. Has your organization embraced DevOps principles?

Business DevOps Savvy

As DevOps tools become more prominent in the IT landscape, it’s important to remember both the business drivers that shaped them and the consistent and repeatable business outcomes they produce. Otherwise, the DevOps message focused on it being a transformation engine risks being wrongfully relegated to the IT process bucket.

What can be misunderstood is DevOps’ pivotal role in dealing with business changes in the wake of digital disruptions. DevOps is about building the organization capability to do just that. It is a compliment to the strategic planning work, providing the approach for digital organizations to hypothesize, validate assumptions and adjust to changing conditions.

Experimenting towards Business Value

According to the World Economic Forum, new digital business models are the principal reason why just over half of the names of companies on the Fortune 500 have disappeared since the year 2000. We could argue that the differentiator between the companies that endured vs. those that did not, has as much to do with their balance sheets as it did with their attitude towards experimentation. New entrants could experiment their way to business value whereas the incumbents dared not.

DevOps practices play a key role in enabling experimentation for a digital business. The organizational willingness to experiment and prevailing views of failure warrant a closer look.

Failure is critical to DevOps Culture

Somewhere along the way, under the pretext of risk management, failure was cast out of the club of viable business moments. Factors like organizational structure, processes, and workplace culture reinforced patterns of risk avoidance.

Today however, the pattern of an emerging digital business tolerates the risk of new customer interactions, unexplained online telemetry, usability feedback, unsuccessful builds, failed test cases, and new security vulnerabilities. Each situation not only offers learning moments, it demands them. It could be tempting to avoid the potential of these moments altogether and preserve a low-risk facade. Based on experience, if set-backs and learning are not visible in the initial stages of a project then little of business value or consequence is taking shape yet.

Of course, changing organizational culture is a monumental undertaking. While DevOps won’t change the culture, it can change the habits and practices surrounding failure, which is a big step in the right direction. DevOps assumes that things will fail and makes it safe to do so early in the cycle. Designing for failure and shifting left are DevOps practices that handle failure gracefully. Indeed, learning to fail forward is a key step in beginning to frame mindsets around failure. DevOps reduces operational risk without sacrificing the vital learning opportunities. This commitment to learning is a key enabler to the success of emerging DevOps teams.

Trust in Teams: Remove the silos

DevOps teams include all the necessary roles in the delivery process: from business leaders to process designers, security experts, quality assurance, as well as the developers and operations roles. The ability for DevOps teams to address cross-cutting concerns and deliver from end-to-end is what sets them apart.

The moment organizational leadership realizes the impact of DevOps teams on the current practices is a key inflection point. Will they be made to navigate existing processes or given the latitude to define new methods? For this reason, selecting the right initiative, and the right team, as an initial pilot becomes crucial.

One of the key benefits of introducing DevOps processes and culture is that it removes the communication barriers between teams and the reliance on the availability of an individual person or team for software delivery to progress.

More than a checklist exercise

Teams don’t “do DevOps”, much like they don’t “do Agile”. They adopt an Agile mindset and live DevOps. Organizational commitment to learning is crucial to success. It’s important to remember that:

• A team cannot do this alone – they need a coach.
• This will not be flawless – there will be learning moments.
• Skillsets and responsibilities will change.
• It is not for every product at first – and not intended for maintenance work.
• It is not for everyone -the change can be overwhelming.

If you would like to understand the backdrop of process, technology and automation, culture, measurement, and outcomes then take the DevOps Self-Assessment.

Already in-flight? Ask Microsoft Enterprise Services how Premier Services for Developers (PSfD) can accelerate your DevOps journey to help to drive the digital transformation everyone is talking about, but few are able to execute.

Or perhaps the time has come to reconnect with the developer within? Discover the full potential of DevOps on Azure.

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Blockchain holds the potential for all individuals in a network to share a system of record, and can eliminate huge amounts of record-keeping, reducing costs, complexity and time.

Business Process Improvement

A Blockchain is a cryptographically secure, shared, data structure that is used to create a digital transaction ledger that, instead of resting with a single provider, is shared among a distributed network of computers. This results in more open and transparent systems that fundamentally change the way we think about exchanging value and assets, enforcing contracts and sharing data. Blockchain decentralizes data in a trustless environment, providing great benefits and changing fundamental processes and models:

• Eliminates Intermediaries – Allows industries to redefine or create new business models
• Reduces Fraud – Highly secure and transparent, making it nearly impossible to change historical records
• Increases Efficiency and Speed – Simplifies transactions and enables T +Zero settlement time
• Increases Revenue and Savings – Savings & revenue opportunities through efficient processes & reduced costs

Blockchain-enabled digital transformation

Some evangelists say the possibilities are limitless for the financial services sector, offering the opportunity to overhaul existing banking infrastructure, speed settlements and securely streamline stock exchanges. Applications can range from storing client identities to handling cross-border payments, clearing and settling bond or equity trades to smart contracts that are self-executing.

Blockchain will disrupt the financial services sector by redesigning costly legacy workflows, improve liquidity and free up capital. It also helps reduce infrastructure costs and improves execution and settlement times. Financial institutions are exploring many opportunities on how to use blockchain including:

• Applications to improve and enhance currency exchange
• Supply chain management
• Trade execution and settlement
• Remittance
• Peer-to-peer transfers
• Micropayments
• Asset regulation
• Correspondent banking
• Regulatory reporting

A Vision of Enterprise Blockchain

Microsoft’s blockchain vision and strategy focuses around accelerating blockchain deployment including:

• Azure Platform/On Premise/Hybrid– We can deploy blockchain in the cloud on Azure or hybrid versions, providing choice to deploy a consortium across multiple Azure regions, customer locations or other public cloud providers
• Rapid Deployment Infrastructure – Marketplace offerings allow you to deploy a working blockchain network with the ledger of your choice in minutes rather than weeks.
• Enterprise Integration Capability – Technologies like Enterprise Smart contracts and supporting technologies in Azure help integrate blockchain into your existing IT platforms, avoiding silos.
• Rapid Deployment of End to End solutions – Our accelerator builds end to end applications to prove value faster

Microsoft Services provides offers to help our customers have an improved understanding of blockchain. Take advantage and learn how to use the Blockchain Technology to simplify and transform your current processes and find the right set of Blockchain and cloud-related technologies to solve for your business challenges. Also, check out this Harvard Business Review article that discusses how Blockchain will energize the smart economy and advance business performance.

The post Banking on Blockchain in Financial Services appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

However, specific implementations still require a healthy degree of research and experimentation to drive-out the full value of blockchain. In this respect, Microsoft is in a unique position to help customers move past conceptual understanding and learn through ideation and experimentation.

With this in mind, the following post will begin by exploring the degree of fit between the key characteristics of a blockchain, and aspects of the Public Sector mission. The post will then explore candidate Public Sector scenarios with a more detailed foray into the use of blockchain for real property management.

Blockchain and Public Service.

Let’s start with why before moving to the how. Blockchain is a building block, or tool, that tackles a specific design challenge: how can a common set of information be shared across many organizations, without any single party being the central authority, while ensuring the changing data set remains trusted? The blockchain proposed to solve this challenged using a distributed ledger:  a distributed database with a trust harness.

In this light, the blockchain can be described as a tool to enable distributed digital trust. It is therefore not surprising that the blockchain has shown the most potential in circumstances where there is an opportunity to share data across multiple parties without having established trust between each party a priori. This is how trust in payments using the bitcoin digital currency based on a blockchain is established.

Another differentiating feature of a blockchain is that it does not rely on any single intermediary. In fact, no single party is trusted absolutely; their actions are scrutinized equally through cryptography.  As a result, the blockchain is also tool that enables disintermediation, or circumventing middlemen, to lower the cost of operations or transactions.

A final aspect of the blockchain to consider: it is important that we are exploring a blockchain and not the blockchain, a mythical solution to transformation everything. Several blockchains will be established for specific purposes or industries, and to address both public and private scenarios.

Using our definition of blockchain as a backdrop we can now explore the data stewardship role played by Public Service.

Public Service: A Trusted Steward

At the heart of the Public Sector’s purpose is maintain the trust of its citizens and constituents. From this imperative of public trust stems the need to demonstrate accountability through transparency.  Furthermore, the Public Sector operates at the interaction of many stakeholders: constituents, citizens, NGOs, private enterprise, and other jurisdictions. We can see here the applicability of the blockchain distributed trust model discussed earlier.

Public sector also must uphold its responsibilities in terms of the efficient management of public funds by minimizing intermediaries. This is of particular interest given its role as the steward of the public wallet. Again, he finds here an alignment with the transactional efficiency of a blockchain.

This high-level overview of how the design characteristics of blockchain presents the to some information stewardship challenges faced by Public Services.

Public Sector Blockchain Scenarios

The Public Service federal, provincial, and municipal level acts as a trusted intermediary and steward of public record in a wide range of areas including registries, permits, claims adjudication, voting, copyright, and trade.

Public service is also a trusted steward of confidential records in the areas of identity management, health, education, and electoral processes. These scenarios share certain aspects their public record relatives which also shape the service to citizen. However, these scenarios also consider confidentiality to be of paramount importance.

Another area that warrants exploration is the question of Public Sector procurement, and supply chain management. Much like its private sector counterparts the public sector much also manage the complexities of increasing elaborate supply chains.

In each of these scenarios a blockchain embeds core capabilities in the area of audit. Indeed, digital records increase the ability to detect fraudulent operations early, preventing unwanted consequences, and reducing the effort or implementing corrective measures downstream.

Detailed Scenario: Real Property Management 

Governments manage among the most diverse real estate portfolios. A blockchain scenario of real property management would include the following elements:

• Devices can track the state of safety of buildings and their maintenance in your organization.
• From bridges to elevators blockchain can provide for a tamper-free ledger of operational data and the resulting maintenance.
• Third-party repair partners can monitor the blockchain for preventive maintenance and record their work back on the blockchain.
• Operational records can also be shared with government entities to verify compliance.

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