The Power of Data-Driven Decisions
By: Ash Powell
Tags: Data, Sre, Decision Making, DevOps, Data Driven Decisions

It seems that lately a lot of organisations don’t understand if their data is a good thing or a bad thing, those that do simply just don’t know when to use it or how to use it. With business leaders and major corporations citing Big Data as the central driver of innovation, the rise of decisions driven by data is a major feature.

Data-driven decisions should form the backbone of most processes. That is why it is important to understand what it is and how it is useful for processes like DevOps and SREs. Software products need data-driven decisions for complex problems at a very high frequency.

Let’s delve into the power of these decisions, how they are made, and what it means for the future of software and its development.

What are Data-Driven Decisions?

Data-driven decisions are made using facts, metrics, and data, which help us make strategic decisions. They also help to make sure that the path chosen is the best one for the goals and objectives of the organisation.

The amount of data collected is both larger and more complex now. The most important things for a data-driven culture includes proficiency in data, agility in its analytics and a sense of community. It’s not easy to transform your company’s perspective on data-driven decisions. A healthy mix of data and analytics, however, makes your decision-making cycles quite different, but this does require a dedicated approach focussed on refining the analytics program.

DevOps and SRE both work on software development, and their functionalities overlap to quite an extent. This is why they both need data-driven decisions to survive. While DevOps combines the development and operations, SRE makes sure of the reliability part, all of this requires the best combination of engineering and operations. These require solutions that can work in different scenarios, which is only possible with the help of decisions that make sure to be data-driven.

How to Make Data-Driven Decisions

To make the most of your data for self, colleagues, and the business, you need to identify how you can make the best of data-driven decisions. Here are a few key factors.

The Business Objective

This move will need to know about your organisation’s goals. This could be as precise as improving traffic or awareness. It will assist in the important performance indicators or other such metrics that impact choices made from data.

Survey

Inputs from people across your DevOps or SRE teams ensure that short term and long-term goals are clear. This helps you analyse data like resources required, time allocated, etc., to prioritise data sources. The inputs also help you identify future states, make roles and responsibilities tailored to each process, and measure success.

Data Collection and Preparation

Data preparation truly begins once you know the quality of data and how far apart it is set. High impact, low complexity data is the place to start for a quick impact.

Visualisation and Impact

For data-driven decisions, you could visualise the data in the form of charts, graphs or maps. This will help you identify outliers, patterns and trends in the data. Such a comparison and analysis allows you to represent the insights you have in an impactful way. It also helps you make decisions that reflect the data but make sure you include key points from the interpreted data.

Insights

Think with the data you have. Finding and communicating insights is a great way to engage SRE and DevOps teams to find solutions to problems. Opportunities and risks can be identified this way, and this is also a great way to include your customers or stakeholders in the process.

Act

Collaborate with your team and develop a plan of action to solve this in the current sprint, or plan for the next one in case of DevOps or SRE cycles. Use this information to make decisions by highlighting the issues in play currently.

Why Make Data-Driven Decisions for SRE and DevOps

There are many reasons the software industry, particularly SRE and DevOps, require Data-driven decisions.

Data Volumes

Reliability. development and operations depend on a dynamic dataset, composed of a system of disparate yet connected number of elements. These environments have a mix of tech, microservices, API and big data, with an implementation of different security features.

The sheer variety and volume of data is difficult to analyse until and unless there is an increase in the ability of decision-makers to sift through the data.

BizOps

For DevOps teams to meet their Agile deadlines, BizOps is a model encouraged by leaders. BizOps is in itself, a data-driven mechanism of support; this connects business and technology.

The digital and software infrastructure for this process requires a good amount of speed, efficiency and scaling up of agility, which the business requires. To incorporate BizOps, teams need a data-driven mechanism for tech and business outcomes.

SRE Models

The SRE model has been around for many years, but many enterprises are new to the adoption. This is why IT leaders in such organisations seek to improve agility. The SRE model, therefore, requires data-driven decisions.

The tools in place can give support to the adoption of these models. Instead of departmental decisions, a data-driven decision princess can automate and optimise major processes.

AI-driven software can also eliminate the security risks from many different approaches.

Conclusion

While initial sessions of both SRE and DevOps may require work to implement data-driven decisions, it will make sure that error budgets, policies, alerts and dashboards are all made according to immediate threats and opportunities. This will include user specifications and other endpoints that allow services to be used as per current applications and requirements.

It also ensures that development teams spend time on areas that require time and attention. It allows for the use of real-time data to identify areas that need work and improvement.

Adopting such a data-driven decision framework might not be easy, but it will definitely help software development in the long run.