Modernizing your existing software delivery processes does not take place from one day to the next; rather it is a journey, where improvements can be made in a phased manner. Organizations are unique and their adoption of DevOps principles can take many forms and can follow different paths that are appropriate to them. No matter where you are in your adoption journey, automating your software delivery can improve safety of your development lifecycle and releases and lower risk through consistent and repeatable processes. We suggest a three-phase incremental approach to automating your software delivery.

For organizations that are beginning to embrace DevOps practices, a good first step is to lay down the foundation on top of which your software delivery automation will be built. Ideally, this foundation should be encapsulated in a platform with a single data model that can support all DevOps stages, from planning to multi-cloud deployments. Some potential benefits of a single data model are better correlation of data across all stages, better data harvesting and visualization leading to the creation of higher-level business value assets, like reports and dashboards that can provide insight into your teams’ software delivery and operational performance and efficiency.