This article is based on research cited by computerworld.com.au, drawing on independent survey data published by Robert Half. Original publication date: October 2017.
The State of DevOps Adoption in Australia
Australian organisations were under significant pressure in 2017 to ship software faster, respond to customer needs more quickly, and modernise their delivery pipelines. IT departments, spanning a wide range of specialisations, faced a critical question: how well are your internal teams actually collaborating?
According to independent research conducted by Robert Half, Australian CIOs rated the collaboration of IT professionals within their own departments an average of 7 out of 10—a score that signals meaningful room for improvement, especially as technology complexity continues to grow.
Why DevOps Exists: The Collaboration Imperative
As IT departments juggle an increasing number of specialised functions—security, infrastructure, application development, data engineering, and more—delivering cohesive products and services that span multiple functional areas becomes progressively harder. DevOps emerged as a direct response to this fragmentation.
At its core, DevOps is a set of cultural practices, tooling conventions, and organisational principles that aim to break down the silos between software development and IT operations teams. The goal is to increase deployment frequency, reduce lead time for changes, improve system reliability, and—ultimately—deliver better outcomes for end customers.
Three primary forces were driving DevOps adoption at the time of this research:
- Speed of delivery: Business units demanded faster iteration cycles and quicker time-to-market for new features.
- Cross-platform concurrency: IT teams needed to work simultaneously across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
- Customer experience: Reliability, performance, and continuous improvement became competitive differentiators.
The Adoption Gap: One in Three CIOs Without DevOps
Despite widespread awareness of DevOps benefits, the Robert Half survey found that 31% of Australian CIOs had not yet implemented a DevOps approach within their IT departments. By contrast, 63% of CIOs reported that they were already building on DevOps foundations to drive further innovation.
This gap is significant. Organisations without a DevOps practice risked slower release cycles, higher change failure rates, and an inability to respond quickly to market or operational events—disadvantages that compound over time in competitive sectors.
Top Barriers to DevOps Implementation
The same survey asked CIOs who had not yet adopted DevOps to identify their primary implementation challenges. The results highlight both talent and structural obstacles:
| Challenge | Percentage of CIOs Citing It |
|---|---|
| Sourcing IT professionals with the right skill sets | 41% |
| Lack of a defined DevOps strategy | 38% |
| Lack of central governance | 36% |
| Changing company culture / hierarchical structures | 36% |
| Improving collaboration within the IT team | 27% |
The dominance of talent-related concerns (41%) reflects a broader IT skills shortage that was already well-documented by 2017. DevOps requires a rare combination of abilities: deep technical knowledge, strong communication skills, and the capacity for systems thinking across organisational boundaries.
Breaking Down Each Barrier
1. The Skills Shortage
Finding engineers who understand both software development and operational concerns—and who can navigate the cultural side of cross-team collaboration—was the single largest obstacle. Demand for DevOps-skilled candidates in Australia was strong, particularly for those with expertise in collaboration tooling, CI/CD pipelines, and strategic project management.
Organisations were particularly keen on candidates capable of big-picture thinking: the ability to understand and advocate for DevOps transformation at an enterprise level, not just within a single team or pipeline.
2. Lack of a DevOps Strategy
Without a clearly articulated strategy, DevOps implementations often stall or become isolated to one team rather than scaling across the organisation. A documented strategy should define goals, success metrics, tooling standards, and a phased rollout plan aligned with business priorities.
3. Lack of Central Governance
DevOps does not mean the absence of structure. Governance frameworks help ensure security, compliance, and consistency as teams gain autonomy over their own pipelines. Organisations without central governance often encounter inconsistent practices, security vulnerabilities, and audit failures as adoption spreads.
4. Culture and Organisational Hierarchy
This is frequently the hardest barrier to overcome. Traditional hierarchical structures, where development and operations report to separate chains of command with different KPIs and incentives, work against the shared ownership model that DevOps requires. Cultural change must come from leadership, not just from engineering teams adopting new tools.
5. Intra-team Collaboration
Even with goodwill on both sides, collaboration between development and operations teams can be hampered by different toolchains, vocabularies, and working rhythms. Shared on-call rotations, joint retrospectives, and common observability tooling can accelerate trust and mutual understanding.
Talent Strategy: Attracting and Retaining DevOps Engineers
For organisations competing for a limited pool of DevOps talent, a reactive hiring approach is rarely sufficient. The research suggests several proactive measures that organisations were exploring at the time:
- Blended workforce models: Using a mix of permanent and contract professionals allows organisations to scale capacity quickly while building long-term internal capability.
- Competitive remuneration: With demand outpacing supply, salary benchmarking is essential to remain competitive in the market.
- Clear career development pathways: DevOps engineers are more likely to stay where they see a defined growth trajectory—whether that is technical specialisation, architecture, or leadership roles.
- Internal upskilling: Investing in training existing developers and sysadmins in DevOps practices is often more cost-effective than hiring externally and reduces cultural friction during transformation.
Key Takeaways
The picture painted by this 2017 research remains instructive even as overall DevOps maturity has increased. Several lessons apply broadly:
- Awareness of DevOps benefits does not automatically translate into adoption. Structural and cultural barriers require deliberate effort to dismantle.
- Talent acquisition is a leading indicator of DevOps success—organisations that invest in finding or developing the right people will outpace those that treat it as a tooling problem alone.
- Strategy and governance are not optional additions; they are prerequisites for sustainable, organisation-wide DevOps adoption.
- Cultural change, especially in hierarchical organisations, takes longer than technical implementation and requires visible executive sponsorship.
For engineering leaders assessing their own DevOps maturity today, these barriers remain relevant reference points. The specific percentages reflect a 2017 Australian sample, but the categories of challenge—skills, strategy, governance, culture, and collaboration—continue to appear consistently in DevOps adoption research globally.