Benefits of ChatOps

The benefits of ChatOps can be broken down into two categories: social and technical. Varying members of your team and organization are going to be attracted to some benefits over others. Management and members of non-technical teams may find the social benefits reason enough to begin the journey.

Engineers and members of technical teams within an organization will likely find greater value in the technical benefits. These more closely address the concerns they are faced with on a day-to-day basis.

Identification of these benefits has led many who are beginning to take notice of the success that DevOps has brought organizations to look to ChatOps as a starting point. At its core, ChatOps is primarily about increased sharing and collaboration regarding efforts and actions taken each day. A higher focus on collaboration, automation, context, and shared institutional knowledge is at the heart of what DevOps has brought to teams and organizations.

With very little effort, teams that begin to move their conversations out of email and private messages and into persistent group chat tools (coupled with powerful chatbots and third-party integrations) begin to see the benefits outlined above. As a result, the organization begins to evolve into one that is efficient in its actions and inherently good at knowledge sharing. On top of that, previous friction in the path toward adoption of DevOps may be a result of not knowing where to start. As teams and management begin to see what automating simple tasks from within group chat can do for them, teams, departments, and entire organizations are able to begin focusing more effort on improvements. It’s through that line of reasoning that real learning and innovation begin to emerge.

Champion of Change

Every organization has its own unique culture, and the larger the company is, the harder it is to change. Through adoption of ChatOps techniques, teams will begin to see incremental improvements toward the culture they seek. It’s not easy, and it will take time. But including more and more individuals and teams in conversations has a way of peeling away the bureaucracy and old-view thinking that typically prevents any real change in a company’s culture. Perhaps most importantly, every significant change in the culture of an organization needs a champion. Someone who takes the lead to be an agent of change. As demonstrated by your interest in this report, it is highly likely that the champion is you.