The past few years have seen shifts in infrastructure and development models across organisations that are moving away from legacy approaches towards more holistic and integrated development, ops, and investment. As McKinsey points out [1], the C-Suite, tired of feeling that IT is a 'black hole', is looking to teams and operational structures that are focused on a mix of business and IT. It is an evolution in thinking and approach to integration and development that has immense potential for the business - a move from DevOps or DevSecOps to BizDevOps that includes business, development, security, and operational skills in one functional team. According to Mandla Mbonambi, CEO of Africonology, it is a change in thinking that can have long-term value in achieving business objectives.

"This approach removes the complexity and obscurity of IT and technology and the investments that surround it and translates it to seamless integration across multiple business touchpoints," he explains. "It's the blend of design, development, business processes and operations into a single and holistic team that understands the value that these parts bring to the business."

The holistic part of the equation is as simple as ensuring that design, architecture, and development are in constant alignment with business processes. In ensuring that these are designed according to business objectives and to meet mandated architecture and software requirements. Ultimately, the move to a BizDevOps approach is less about adding more cooks to the kitchen and more about making sure that the final dish served is going to do what the business needs it to do.

"This is a critical step-change in thinking and one that organisations need to invest into today," says Mbonambi. "The past year has shown the value of digital, the next year is going to show the value in fully realising the potential of digital. For organisations to achieve their full potential, they need to mandate holistic integration and ensure that it becomes a part of their full digital transformation strategy. This will ensure that all integration and interaction points are aligned in terms of delivery, and the value of service to the organisation."

Value has become a key metric in defining the value of technology for most companies today. It is intrinsic in ensuring that every IT investment, every development, every slice of software, and every touchpoint is aligned to strategy and the organisation. It is also part and parcel of these BizDevOps team structures as communication is streamlined and delivers the right messages and solutions to the right people, audiences, and systems.

"When working across multiple systems and organisations, an organic team that's fully collaborative and communicating clearly is the ultimate end game," says Mbonambi. "This means that any changes, developments, and planning is clearly communicated and fits into the relevant silos within the organisation properly. This is as close to the quality assurance edge that development can get, and it is precisely what the business needs to ensure that projects consider every system within the organisation, that they test in siloes, and that every point is working properly across single and multiple systems.

"This is critical because the system has to meet the business mandate and objectives, and it has to have the right IT capabilities across multiple systems and siloes," says Mbonambi. "Data has to be correctly processed. Quality assurance must be embedded into the actual process. By folding QA into a holistic integration strategy, the teams ensure that there is value in accurate architecture, information, delivery of custom assets, business processes, and services."

In the end it will also save on costs, which will always be a highlight to any business. The cost of holistic integration is measured by its weight in value. In its ability to introduce seamless processes and full end-to-end capabilities within the organisation. Teams can pick up the threads of any integration, resolve challenges around client service delivery, and manage complexities around security with far greater visibility.

"This approach delivers four key benefits to the business - seamless data integration, communication and storage; tightly met objectives; integration points across all processes; and more reliable outputs and processes," concludes Mbonambi.