The DevOps Funnel: Introducing DevOps as an Antecedent for Digitalization in Large-Scale Organizations

Abstract

Business productivity and speed to market are among the top priorities of IS managers to stay successful. To achieve these goals, a change in business processes or models is often required, which is often linked to the phenomenon of digitalization. Enterprises have observed that a holistic approach to agile IS development is essential to enable this change, leading to the concept of “DevOps”. While past studies have delivered first insights about DevOps, an understanding of which factors are important to introduce DevOps in organizations, and how DevOps relates to digitalization is still missing. To close this gap, we conducted a two-staged study of literature review and a multiple-case study. Our findings suggest that DevOps links success and practices for development and operations across actors of different organizational levels. We find that DevOps supports digitalization efforts, contribute to the understanding of the DevOps phenomenon, and identify worthwhile paths for further research.