8CIOReview | | MAY 2021IN MY OPINIONLike any good engineer, I am always looking to be more efficient whilst being better enabled to do my job. So, I was a DevOps advocate before I even knew what it was.And I am lucky to be working for Nationwide Building Society. DevOps is a natural fit for our organization; we aspire to build long lasting solutions, safe in the knowledge that we can pivot quickly to do what's right for our members. And with such talent in our teams, empowering our Engineers to make real change to our business outcomes is really important to us.So, with the Financial Services sector currently going through such a high level of change it isn't difficult to see how DevOps adoption is critical.And therein lies the challenge. My experience of delivering solutions has taught me to be mindful of two potential outcomes; (1) new solutions may land with barely a ripple (i.e. less take up than expected), or (2) they will land with huge demand and interest. DevOps at Nationwide certainly falls into the latter category (of the two outcomes, this is the preferable one). But this urgency to adopt DevOps has meant some confusion over what it is, what problems it will solve, and who manages prioritization. Perhaps most interestingly, we have seen tooling demand overtake the methodology and understanding of true end-to-end DevOps adoption.I don't think we are the only organization to experience this. But it has meant that locking down a DevOps enablement strategy has been challenging; with a number of stakeholders advising differing needs (what comes first? Test or Infra automation/IaC, help with code branching strategies, security automation...?). And these issues can be compounded by Engineers proactively identifying localized tooling solutions; which we cannot scale until we can establish the correct funding approach to deliver as an enterprise.While we have discovered a methodology that has captured the imagination, the challenge is to get it to all our Engineers quick enough.So, we are addressing this in a number of ways. We have built a central enablement capability; Engineers who deliver key tooling outcomes and work alongside our wider Engineering community to support the exploitation of DevOps methodologies. We are adapting the way we work, embracing Agile principles to ensure flow, learning how we identify and remove impediments and handoffs across Engineering teams. By Ben Angell, Head of DevOps Engineering, Nationwide Building SocietySURFING THE DEVOPS DEMAND WAVE!
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