Microsoft Azure DevOps announces integration with ServiceNow ITSM

[Richard91]

Digital Transformation is driving many organizations to adopt DevOps. Some are starting small and others are embracing DevOps on a broad scale. As Tech Republic pointed out in a recent article, thought leaders like George Spafford of Gartner recognize that “DevOps Works” and "It can deliver real value. It can help firms better deal with uncertainty, and it can help them deliver value faster." The article continues with hints for successful implementation of DevOps.

Large Enterprises especially have a lot to gain but often need to be the most risk-averse, especially if they are in an environment of regulation, or constrained by contractual requirements. These organizations have typically already embraced sound change management practices and want to continue to use those practices, possibly even extending the auditing and reporting aspects, as they increase the rate of change and delivery of value with DevOps. These organizations want to ensure that changes are recorded and evaluated, and that authorized changes are prioritized, planned, tested, implemented, documented and reviewed in a controlled manner.

That’s why it’s important for DevOps toolchains to be aligned and integrated with technology best-practices like change management. It’s why this integration announcement from Microsoft is also significant. As Shashank Bansal of Microsoft put it: “By including change management in CI/CD pipelines, teams can reduce the risks associated with changes and follow IT service management methodologies, while getting all DevOps benefits like reduced deployment time, transparency and traceability. It is common for IT teams in enterprises to use ServiceNow change management methodologies and development teams to use Azure Pipelines.”

The Azure DevOps integration with ServiceNow makes it simple to ensure appropriate change controls are an inherent part of your DevOps pipeline while adding no friction to your delivery of value. The integration adds a seamless interaction with existing change authorization processes. This can make the change authorization and tracking process more frictionless for developers that otherwise may have experienced delays before their work can be deployed to production.

This frictionless principle is at the root of ServiceNow’s plans for ‘Enterprise DevOps’, a new product set that was first announced at Knowledge 2018 and due for initial availability to ServiceNow customers in a timeframe parallel to, and similar to the Madrid release. Enterprise DevOps will extend out-of-the-box integrations to a wide range of 3rd party tools allowing the entire DevOps tool-chain to participate in ServiceNow workflows such as the seamless automation of change. The use of the ServiceNow platform to manage these end-to-end relationships will allow for unique reporting insights that will help development and operations work more closely together as part of their journey to DevOps. More information on this product will be available starting around the end of March 2019.