Ministry of Justice picks Automation Logic to bring DevOps to 80 IT services and "reduce hosting costs by 90 per cent"

"Automation Logic are collaborative, innovative and humble," says MoJ head of architecture

The Ministry of Justice has revealed that it took on cloud automation, DevOps specialist firm Automation Logic to make "significant improvement" to 80 different IT services.

These included hosting environments, support, change and release models across the Ministry.

Results included "60 per cent platform adoption rates" across the organisation, civil servants in "all key strategic roles [benefitting] within 9 months", reducing hosting costs by 90 per cent, reduced deployment costs and increased release frequency of software.

Apparently, the software team shifted from "expensive six monthly manually tested releases" to weekly releases by "improving tooling".

This included source and version control via Git and source automation via open source, Java-based Jenkins.

"Focusing specifically on the change and release process, the norm at the beginning of the engagement was for large, infrequent releases (one every six months) which were tested manually," explained Automation Logic.

"The testing and release process was operated by large systems integrators at great expense and with little scope for process or cultural improvement. Automation Logic helped establish in-house product teams, with Automation Logic consultants in lead technical or coaching positions but with civil servants in strategic roles to ensure they stayed in control of overall direction."

The building of multidiscplinary teams to speed along releases also required pulling in "sometimes reluctant" participation from third patty suppliers, and was "by no means an easy thing to achieve," said the vendor.

But head of architecture Dave Rogers at MoJ Digital and Technology seems to be in agreement:

"Automation Logic are the role model for what it takes for a DevOps oriented vendor to be in order to be successful in the public sector," he said.

"Automation Logic are collaborative, innovative and humble making them a great fit for our agile approach to software development. They are always able to deliver value to citizens whilst supporting the wider digital agenda of insourcing and keeping civil servants in strategic control of the services they are responsible for."