Unlocking XOps: From DevOps Metrics to AIOps, BizDevOps, and FinOps

This article is based on Professor Niu Xiaoling’s GNSEC 2022 keynote on next‑generation software engineering.

The presentation is organized into five parts:

XOps framework

DevOps research and operational efficiency metrics

AIOps

BizDevOps

FinOps

1. XOps Framework

What is the XOps framework? It is driven by market pressure for rapid product iteration, higher user expectations, and technological advances such as containers, micro‑services, low‑code/no‑code, RPA, and AI that lower the technical barrier for operators.

Overall, high‑level technical‑operations practices extend toward intelligent operations; DevOps effectiveness must be measured; business‑side extensions lead to BizDevOps for full‑lifecycle value management; financial‑side extensions produce FinOps for cost control. These capabilities are core competencies for digital transformation.

2. DevOps Research and Efficiency Metrics

What is DevOps research and operational efficiency measurement? National policies encourage digital development. Enterprises face three major challenges: difficulty of measurement, difficulty of improvement, and difficulty of assessment.

Measurement difficulty . Enterprises should establish a measurement system, e.g., value‑stream analysis and code‑health analysis.

Improvement difficulty . Build an engineering capability map and functional rankings to motivate engineers to adopt the capability framework.

Assessment difficulty . Encourage the creation of talent profiles and engineer evaluation systems.

Four drivers increase attention to efficiency measurement: internal business demand, technical drivers (breaking silos), market pressure, and external ecosystem digitalization.

Effective measurement helps enterprises improve quality and efficiency, giving engineers more time for innovation.

Three value layers of a measurement system:

Foundation layer: improve people and tool capabilities.

Product delivery layer: process indicators focusing on flow efficiency, balancing efficiency, output, and cost.

Business value layer: assess whether business goals are achieved and map efficiency indicators.

Examples: a large financial institution built a platform linking idea generation, design, development, testing, release, operation, monitoring, and feedback, creating a complete software value‑delivery loop; a leading internet company built dashboards for value‑stream insight, full‑view team management, and development perspective.

The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) released a maturity model with 20 modules and over 100 items, defining five levels from initial to excellent. Over 30 enterprises have participated.

A corresponding system‑tool model contains 17 modules and 160+ items, with three maturity levels.

In 2021, the DevOps universal efficiency measurement model was evaluated, with companies such as Baidu, Ping An Bank, ZTE, and others passing.

3. AIOps

As system numbers and business scale grow, operational data increase, evolving from manual to process‑based, automated, DevOps, and finally intelligent operations. AIOps brings automatic execution, analysis, and intelligent decision‑making to enterprise‑level DevOps on the operations side.

Intelligent operations aggregate diverse data, simplify analysis, and support decision‑making across historical, current, and future events, enabling knowledge accumulation, real‑time anomaly detection, fault prediction, and prevention.

The survey of more than 30 AIOps tools identified capabilities in:

Intelligent monitoring management

Intelligent fault handling

Cost and capacity management

Intelligent user‑experience management

Intelligent security operations

The AIOps architecture is abstracted into data layer, intelligent computing layer, and application‑scenario layer. Maturity focuses on quality, cost, efficiency, and security.

The “AIOps Intelligent Operations Capability Maturity Model – Part 1” provides guidance for building overall intelligent‑operations capability.

The model defines five levels from L1 (initial) to L5 (highly intelligent), offering a roadmap for AIOps adoption.

Part 2 describes system and tool capabilities, with three maturity levels (comprehensive, excellent, leading). Nearly 50 enterprises contributed to the standard.

In July 2021, CAICT led the first international AIOps standard in ITU‑T SG13, promoting global consensus and industry development.

By the end of last year, eight enterprises and eleven projects passed the AIOps tool‑capability assessment, including Hua‑Tai Securities, Zhejiang Mobile, Guangdong Mobile, and others.

4. BizDevOps

BizDevOps focuses on delivering business value by integrating IT, operations, and business functions into cross‑functional teams, using low‑tech‑threshold platforms and tools to support end‑to‑end delivery and lifecycle management.

The five focus areas are:

Business value management

Application and service development

Customer success operations

People and culture transformation

Platform and tool support

Business value management monitors, measures, analyzes, and optimizes economic, efficiency, and experience value to guide production.

Application development emphasizes agile response, visual development, secure release, and self‑operation to improve quality and efficiency.

Customer success operations use professional IT tools to monitor, model, analyze, and optimize services, building operational views and closing loops.

People and culture transformation builds new teams, talent loops, and customer‑centric work modes, fostering innovation.

Platform and tool support unifies “people, goods, place” governance, leveraging low‑code, AI, and cloud to lower technical barriers and enhance integrated development.

5. FinOps

FinOps integrates finance and IT to manage the full lifecycle of resource investment, ensuring rational cloud‑cost spending and demonstrating actual impact.

It involves three aspects:

Cultural change: align all participants on FinOps goals and roles.

Strong cross‑department collaboration.

Capability building: budgeting control, cost allocation optimization, accounting, plus performance, architecture, and resource optimization.

Since 2020, a FinOps industry alliance has been formed, partnering with the Linux Foundation, and hosting salons to promote ecosystem development, with nearly 50 member organizations.

In 2021, a maturity model for cloud‑resource financial operations was released, covering budgeting, cost awareness, optimization, aggregation, and settlement across three levels.

Initial assessments show platforms from Alibaba Cloud and Chinasoft International passing the first evaluation.