The usual case for DevOps centres on speed, cost reduction, and competitive advantage. Those benefits are real, but there is a less-discussed reason to adopt DevOps that may matter even more in certain industries: it makes your processes — and your outputs — demonstrably safer.
The Barriers to Technology Adoption
Despite decades of evidence that technology improves business outcomes, many organisations — particularly in traditional or regulated industries — are slow to change. Two obstacles come up repeatedly:
- Cultural unfamiliarity. Many employees have never worked in a technology-driven environment. They do not know what is possible, so they cannot advocate for change.
- Cost and complexity. Technology promises transformation but frequently under-delivers on that promise while over-delivering on its invoice. The volume of available tools and platforms makes choosing a starting point genuinely difficult.
These barriers explain why technology-resistant organisations exist even in 2024. The question is how to break through them — and the answer often starts not with technology itself, but with a clearly articulated business problem.
A Real-World Example: The British Medical Journal
Few case studies illustrate the safety argument for DevOps as clearly as that of The British Medical Journal (BMJ). The BMJ is approximately 170 years old and was, by heritage, a print business. Its content is consumed by doctors and clinicians who depend on that information to make patient-care decisions — sometimes at 3 a.m.
Sharon Cooper, the Chief Digital Officer of the BMJ (as cited in the original TechTarget article this post draws from), was brought in to manage the organisation’s cultural and digital transformation. Her challenge was not simply a technology problem — it was a mindset problem rooted in 170 years of print-first thinking.
Cooper’s early signal that change was urgent came when a sales director placed his laptop on her desk and declared it was as useful as an Etch A Sketch. The message was unambiguous: existing technology was failing the people who relied on it.
Starting Small: The Practical Path to Change
Cooper did not respond by launching a wholesale infrastructure overhaul. Instead, she started with small, affordable, high-visibility changes. One early move was replacing Lotus Notes with Google Workspace (then Google Apps), eliminating the need for staff to work overnight to complete routine tasks.
This incremental approach is significant. In organisations where technology is unfamiliar or distrusted, large-scale change programmes tend to fail because they generate fear and resistance before they generate results. Small wins build credibility and demonstrate that change is manageable.
From Agile to DevOps: A Staged Transition
Once credibility was established, Cooper moved the engineering team to Agile practices, shifting their focus toward end-user outcomes rather than internal process milestones. With Agile in place as a foundation, the team then adopted DevOps principles — and migrated products and services to the new model one at a time.
The full transition took approximately three years. The outcome was a system where clinical products are no longer updated on an annual publication cycle, but continuously — whenever clinical guidance changes.
If a drug dosage recommendation changes, the BMJ can now reflect that change within hours rather than waiting for a scheduled release.
This is where the safety argument for DevOps becomes concrete. Outdated clinical information is not merely inconvenient — it can contribute to patient harm. By moving to a continuous delivery model, the BMJ turned its platform into a reliably current source of medical guidance, adhering to the medical profession’s foundational principle of “do no harm.”
Why DevOps Creates Safer Processes
The BMJ example generalises beyond healthcare publishing. DevOps creates safer processes for several interconnected reasons:
- Smaller, more frequent releases reduce risk. Deploying small changes continuously is far less risky than deploying large batches infrequently. Errors are smaller in scope and easier to isolate and roll back.
- Automated testing catches defects earlier. A DevOps pipeline that includes automated testing finds problems before they reach production, rather than after.
- Monitoring and observability enable rapid response. DevOps teams instrument their systems to detect anomalies quickly. The mean time to recovery (MTTR) shrinks significantly compared to traditional release models.
- Cross-functional collaboration reduces handoff errors. When development, operations, and quality assurance work in shared pipelines with shared accountability, errors that arise from siloed handoffs are eliminated.
- Continuous delivery keeps information current. In domains where accuracy is safety-critical — medicine, finance, compliance — the ability to push verified updates rapidly is not a luxury. It is a requirement.
Key Takeaways for DevOps Practitioners
The BMJ’s journey offers practical guidance for engineering leaders tasked with driving DevOps adoption in resistant organisations:
- Lead with a business problem, not a technology solution. Cooper did not pitch DevOps — she identified that technology was failing customers and worked backward to the practices that could fix it.
- Start with quick wins that build trust. Small, visible improvements create the political capital needed for larger transformations.
- Sequence the transition. Agile practices create the cultural foundation that makes a DevOps model sustainable. Trying to implement both simultaneously in a change-averse organisation often fails.
- Migrate incrementally. Product by product, service by service — this approach limits risk and allows teams to learn before scaling.
- Expect a multi-year timeline. Real cultural and technical transformation takes time. The BMJ’s journey took around three years. Setting realistic expectations is essential for maintaining organisational support.
Ultimately, when someone asks “why DevOps?” the speed-and-cost answer is sufficient in many contexts. But in industries where accuracy, reliability, and currency of information directly affect human welfare, the answer is simpler and more compelling: because it makes you safer.
This article draws on a case study originally published by TechTarget. The BMJ case is attributed to Sharon Cooper, CDO of The British Medical Journal.