This article draws on expert commentary originally published at enterprisersproject.com.
DevOps and Digital Transformation: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Scaling DevOps is no small feat — but the stakes are high. Experts consistently argue that a stalled DevOps journey puts the entire digital transformation effort at risk. The two initiatives are intrinsically connected: DevOps shifts organisational culture, breaks down harmful silos, and creates the conditions for continuous change and rapid experimentation. Those are precisely the capabilities organisations need to meet evolving customer demands.
Matthew Skelton, Head of Consulting at Conflux and co-author of Team Topologies, sums it up clearly: “Digital transformation is almost impossible without well-placed collaboration between different teams building and running IT systems. The speed of technology change is so quick that no one team can expect to understand all the details of relevant technologies, so we need to enable teams to focus on a smaller problem domain. Without a foundation of infrastructure automation and well-chosen team collaborations, the rapid pace of digital transformation would be impossible.”
10 DevOps Best Practices That Accelerate Digital Transformation
The following ten practices represent concrete ways in which DevOps principles and methods move organisations closer to their digital transformation goals. Each section includes perspective from a recognised practitioner or industry voice.
1. DevOps Changes the Cultural Mindset
Steve Burton, CI/CD & DevOps Evangelist, Harness: “DevOps should be the catalyst or team that accelerates change in any modern business, regardless of whether you call that change digital transformation, cloud-native, or something else entirely. DevOps is about taking a business idea and helping the business realise that idea as quickly as possible — it’s not really about technology or buzzwords.”
Corporate culture is the primary reason many large organisations cannot transform. Years of established habits around how software is developed, shipped, and operated create enormous inertia. DevOps challenges that inertia directly. It replaces red tape, committee gatekeeping, and bureaucratic approval chains with a bias toward action — enabling teams to deliver value to the business without unnecessary friction.
Key takeaway: Cultural change is the hardest and most important part of both DevOps adoption and digital transformation. Treat it as a first-class concern, not an afterthought.
2. DevOps Unites People, Process, and Technology
Eran Kinsbruner, Technical Evangelist, Perfecto: “DevOps enables organisations to release new value to their customers faster, hence allowing them to mature and transform their digital face. DevOps unites people, process, and technology: when all three are aligned toward the same business goals, innovation is introduced faster.”
A common failure mode in digital transformation is optimising only one of these three dimensions — investing in tooling without fixing process, or redesigning process without bringing people along. DevOps explicitly acknowledges all three as equally important levers. It also reduces internal waste by focusing teams on high-priority digital innovations, freeing capacity that was previously absorbed by lower-value work.
Without DevOps practices, Kinsbruner argues, the speed of releases needed to stay competitive simply cannot be sustained, and the quality of those releases cannot be guaranteed at scale.
3. DevOps Uncovers Patterns That Help Organisations Improve
Helen Beal, DevOpsologist, Ranger4: “DevOps’ role in digital transformation is to help organisations understand the patterns and practices that are likely to improve their performance in the face of digital disruption, thus improving their competitive posture.”
The journey from a traditional, hierarchical command-and-control organisation to a digitally ready one requires substantial behavioural change. Authority must be distributed. Autonomy and alignment must coexist. Everyone must feel empowered to contribute. DevOps provides both the frameworks and the cultural models to pursue this shift in a structured, evidence-based way.
Crucially, Beal points out that optimising the flow from idea to value delivery is not merely a matter of building a CI/CD pipeline — it requires deliberate attention to the human and organisational patterns that either enable or obstruct that flow.
4. DevOps Enables Teams to Self-Steer Toward Better Solutions
Matthew Skelton, Head of Consulting, Conflux: “DevOps can help make IT infrastructure more testable, resilient, observable, dynamic, and on-demand. This enables safer, more rapid changes to the supporting IT infrastructure, which in turn enables safer, more rapid changes to software applications and services.”
Skelton emphasises two additional benefits. First, infrastructure-as-code practices — where all changes to build, deploy, and infrastructure systems are driven from version-controlled code — eliminate the ambiguity of manual configuration and provide full traceability. Second, when this is combined with rich telemetry from modern monitoring and observability platforms, teams gain a powerful, real-time awareness of system behaviour.
That awareness reduces Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) and enables teams to take genuine ownership of production services. The result is an organisation capable of responding quickly to changing market conditions — one that can “self-steer” toward better solutions continuously.
5. DevOps Makes Automation a Strategic Priority
Jayne Groll, CEO, DevOps Institute: “IT has been so busy automating the world, we almost forgot the benefit of automating our own toil. DevOps advocates the optimisation of automation to bring its principles to life.”
DevOps principles — increasing flow, shortening feedback loops, encouraging continuous learning and experimentation — require automation to operate at scale. CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, infrastructure provisioning, and site reliability engineering (SRE) practices all reduce the manual overhead that slows delivery and introduces error.
Groll adds an important caveat: automation is not a magic solution on its own. It must be designed by skilled people, embedded in sound process, and supported by an appropriate culture. Automation that codifies a broken process simply produces broken results faster. But without meaningful automation, digital transformation efforts face a hard ceiling on how far they can scale.
6. DevOps Shortens Feedback Loops
One of the foundational principles of DevOps — derived from Lean and Agile thinking — is the relentless shortening of feedback loops. When developers receive immediate feedback on the quality and behaviour of their code through automated tests, monitoring alerts, and rapid deployment cycles, they can identify and correct problems in minutes rather than weeks.
Shorter feedback loops are directly valuable to digital transformation because they reduce the cost of experimentation. When it is cheap and fast to test a hypothesis in production, organisations can run more experiments, learn faster, and build products that more closely match what customers actually need.
7. DevOps Breaks Down Organisational Silos
Traditional IT organisations often suffer from deep silos between development, operations, security, QA, and the business. These silos slow delivery, create handoff bottlenecks, and generate blame-shifting when things go wrong. Digital transformation demands cross-functional collaboration — and DevOps is designed precisely to foster it.
Shared ownership of services, shared on-call responsibilities, and shared metrics encourage development and operations teams to treat software delivery as a unified concern rather than a relay race. This organisational shift is a prerequisite for the agility that digital transformation demands.
8. DevOps Supports Continuous Delivery of New Revenue Streams
Digital transformation is ultimately about creating new value — new products, services, and revenue streams enabled by technology. DevOps enables this by making it possible to ship small increments of working software frequently and safely. Organisations that can release daily or multiple times a day can respond to market signals, validate new business models, and iterate on products far faster than those constrained to quarterly or annual release cycles.
This capability is not merely operational — it is a strategic competitive advantage. It allows organisations to treat software delivery as an engine of business innovation rather than a cost centre.
9. DevOps Improves Security and Compliance Posture (DevSecOps)
Digital transformation increases the attack surface of organisations — more cloud services, more APIs, more endpoints, more data flowing across more systems. DevOps, extended into DevSecOps, integrates security checks, vulnerability scanning, and compliance validation directly into the CI/CD pipeline rather than treating security as a gate at the end of the delivery cycle.
Shifting security left — detecting issues earlier in the development process — reduces the cost and risk of remediation. It also means security does not become the bottleneck that stalls digital initiatives. Organisations undergoing transformation cannot afford to treat security as an afterthought.
10. DevOps Builds a Foundation for Continuous Improvement
Digital transformation is not a project with a defined end date — it is an ongoing capability. The organisations that sustain transformation over time are those that build systems for continuous learning and improvement. DevOps provides exactly that foundation through blameless post-mortems, retrospectives, metrics-driven decision-making, and a culture that treats failure as a learning opportunity rather than a reason to punish.
The Three Ways framework articulated in The Phoenix Project — flow, feedback, and continual learning — maps directly onto what mature digital organisations do. DevOps operationalises these principles at the team and organisational level.
Where to Start
If your organisation is struggling to make progress on digital transformation, the most productive question to ask is not “which tool should we buy?” but rather “which DevOps practice are we missing or doing poorly?” The ten practices above provide a useful diagnostic lens. Cultural change and team structure tend to be the highest-leverage starting points, but the right entry point will depend on your organisation’s specific constraints and maturity level.
What is clear from practitioner experience is that DevOps and digital transformation reinforce each other. Progress on one creates conditions for progress on the other. Neglecting DevOps while pursuing digital transformation is like trying to renovate a building without scaffolding — technically possible in theory, but unnecessarily difficult and risky in practice.