The impact of DevOps on ROI: a brief guide for the CIO

DevOps is a critical component in software delivery today. It is non-negotiable to deliver software faster, better, cheaper, and to create value for customers and your business. But DevOps is not a journey for the faint of heart. It requires time, discipline, passion, continuous measurement, improvement, and alignment with your business goals and customer needs. Most importantly, it requires leadership with vision. In this blog, I offer a glimpse of the challenges and opportunities. I also show you where you can find a fuller guide and more help, should you need it.

(Hint: if you’re interested in improving ROI, you probably do.)

Understand value stream mapping

As a CIO, you face a crucial question: how do you measure and justify your DevOps investment? While the benefits can be substantial, quantifying them requires careful analysis and the right metrics.

Your first step in establishing those metrics is examining your value stream - every activity from initial request to final delivery needs to be visualised. This reveals where time and money leak away through inefficiencies, manual processes and bottlenecks. Think of it like servicing a water supply system. You wouldn't just measure flow at the tap. You'd check pressure and quality at key points throughout the network to spot leaks and fix problems before they occur.

Measure what matters

For each stage of your value stream map, you need to measure your performance using metrics and data that are relevant for you. For example, measure each stage's cycle time, lead time, work in progress, throughput, defect rate, failure rate, downtime, resource utilisation, operational cost, or maintenance cost.

Top performing DevOps organisations show what's possible when you get this right:

• Enhancing the quality and reliability of your software
• Reduce the cost and complexity of your IT operations
• Optimising your team's efficiency and productivity
• Enhancing team morale and motivation
• Simplifying and standardising processes and tools
• Getting your IT strategy with your business strategy working together

Achieving results like these is, of course, very satisfying. But it requires understanding which metrics matter most for your individual business.

Embrace the broader business impact

As these results suggest, you should definitely look beyond immediate cost savings when thinking about DevOps and ROI. Effective DevOps practices don’t just cut costs. They boost team morale, reduce staff turnover, and improve customer satisfaction too. For example, if you know that increasing CSAT by 1 point increases customer loyalty by 5%, and each loyal customer will generate $100 in lifetime value, then you can multiply that by the number of customers and the change in CSAT you achieve as one tangible metric of wider value for the business that can be delivered through DevOps.

Build your business case

Creating a compelling business case for DevOps means connecting technical improvements to business outcomes just like the customer satisfaction example I mentioned above.

Key areas you could examine include:

• Current development costs and potential reductions
• Time saved through automation
• Reduced production issues and downtime
• Improved speed to market
• Enhanced team productivity