April 29, 2026
The CDW Digital Velocity Factory: A System for Building Systems
Modern software engineering requires systems and teams that can deliver speed, quality and adaptability at scale.
Organizations need modern approaches to software engineering to stay competitive, yet many struggle to implement new technologies and build internal skills while managing day-to-day workloads. Frequently, legacy systems and mounting technical debt create a cycle of trade-offs that favor short-term speed over long-term quality.
To sustainably balance speed, quality and adaptability, organizations need a repeatable system for delivering change at scale. Cloud-native infrastructure enables scalability and flexibility, while automation reduces bottlenecks and enforces consistency across environments. Agile practices let teams tackle backlogs, technical debt and new initiatives incrementally. Together, these capabilities provide a foundation for continuous delivery and innovation — shifting software engineering from a reactive cost center to a strategic engine that supports growth, innovation and other business objectives.
CDW’s Digital Velocity Factory helps organizations modernize people, processes and technology to accelerate software delivery and establish a system that’s built for whatever comes next.
CDW’s Digital Velocity Factory helps organizations accelerate software delivery by removing friction across people, processes and technology.
Organizations need modern approaches to software engineering to stay competitive, yet many struggle to implement new technologies and build internal skills while managing day-to-day workloads. Frequently, legacy systems and mounting technical debt create a cycle of trade-offs that favor short-term speed over long-term quality.
To sustainably balance speed, quality and adaptability, organizations need a repeatable system for delivering change at scale. Cloud-native infrastructure enables scalability and flexibility, while automation reduces bottlenecks and enforces consistency across environments. Agile practices let teams tackle backlogs, technical debt and new initiatives incrementally. Together, these capabilities provide a foundation for continuous delivery and innovation — shifting software engineering from a reactive cost center to a strategic engine that supports growth, innovation and other business objectives.
CDW’s Digital Velocity Factory helps organizations modernize people, processes and technology to accelerate software delivery and establish a system that’s built for whatever comes next.
CDW’s Digital Velocity Factory helps organizations accelerate software delivery by removing friction across people, processes and technology.
In today’s business landscape, the ability to deliver high-quality software quickly and consistently is a primary driver of competitiveness. While software engineering used to be an IT concern, it’s now a crucial capability across the business. Organizations that can deliver new features and applications more quickly can gain a significant market advantage. However, many companies struggle to bridge the gap between legacy systems and skills and modern, cloud-native infrastructure that supports automation, integration and agile development.
Organizations face increasing business demands and limited development capacity. This imbalance creates a cycle of trade-offs that favor speed today at the expense of quality tomorrow, resulting in fragile systems and mounting technical debt. Organizations often want to modernize applications but lack the expertise to deploy the necessary technologies.
Given these challenges, traditional approaches to software development — project-based delivery, siloed teams and hero-driven execution — are no longer sufficient. Aging platforms and workforce constraints slow organizations down precisely when the market demands faster response and continuous innovation. For instance, DevSecOps professionals report that inefficient processes waste an average of seven hours weekly.
Leaders often believe the solution lies in higher headcounts or different tooling, but the deeper issue is structural: Most organizations lack a repeatable system for delivering change at scale. Rather than focusing on individual applications or one-time modernization projects, forward-looking enterprises invest in the capability to continuously evolve their software ecosystem. They build resilience by establishing a system for changing systems through cloud-native architecture, automation and lean agile practices.
With new systems in place, software engineering can shift from a cost center that struggles to manage backlogs to a strategic engine that enables growth, resilience and competitive differentiation.
41%
The percentage of software developers who cited technical debt, including refactoring complex or outdated code, as the primary cause of lower productivity and higher frustration
Source: Sonar, “State of Code Developer Survey Report,” January 2026
CDW’s Digital Velocity Factory helps organizations establish software engineering practices that enable innovation and growth.
In today’s business landscape, the ability to deliver high-quality software quickly and consistently is a primary driver of competitiveness. While software engineering used to be an IT concern, it’s now a crucial capability across the business. Organizations that can deliver new features and applications more quickly can gain a significant market advantage. However, many companies struggle to bridge the gap between legacy systems and skills and modern, cloud-native infrastructure that supports automation, integration and agile development.
Organizations face increasing business demands and limited development capacity. This imbalance creates a cycle of trade-offs that favor speed today at the expense of quality tomorrow, resulting in fragile systems and mounting technical debt. Organizations often want to modernize applications but lack the expertise to deploy the necessary technologies.
Given these challenges, traditional approaches to software development — project-based delivery, siloed teams and hero-driven execution — are no longer sufficient. Aging platforms and workforce constraints slow organizations down precisely when the market demands faster response and continuous innovation. For instance, DevSecOps professionals report that inefficient processes waste an average of seven hours weekly.
Leaders often believe the solution lies in higher headcounts or different tooling, but the deeper issue is structural: Most organizations lack a repeatable system for delivering change at scale. Rather than focusing on individual applications or one-time modernization projects, forward-looking enterprises invest in the capability to continuously evolve their software ecosystem. They build resilience by establishing a system for changing systems through cloud-native architecture, automation and lean agile practices.
With new systems in place, software engineering can shift from a cost center that struggles to manage backlogs to a strategic engine that enables growth, resilience and competitive differentiation.
CDW’s Digital Velocity Factory helps organizations establish software engineering practices that enable innovation and growth.
Software Engineering by the Numbers
38%
The percentage of organizations reporting that more than 16% of production or user release changes result in degraded service and require remediation
Source: Google Cloud, “DORA: State of AI-Assisted Software Development,” September 2025
35%
The percentage of organizations that consistently restore service within one day when a failed deployment results in an outage or impairment
Source: Google Cloud, “DORA: State of AI-Assisted Software Development,” September 2025
4
The average number of AI tools used by software development teams, with 35% of developers accessing tools through personal rather than work accounts
Source: Sonar, “State of Code Developer Survey Report,” January 2026
Software Engineering by the Numbers
38%
The percentage of organizations reporting that more than 16% of production or user release changes result in degraded service and require remediation
Source: Google Cloud, “DORA: State of AI-Assisted Software Development,” September 2025
35%
The percentage of organizations that consistently restore service within one day when a failed deployment results in an outage or impairment
Source: Google Cloud, “DORA: State of AI-Assisted Software Development,” September 2025
4%
The average number of AI tools used by software development teams, with 35% of developers accessing tools through personal rather than work accounts
Source: Sonar, “State of Code Developer Survey Report,” January 2026
- SOFTWARE ENGINEERING CHALLENGES
- REPEATABLE SOFTWARE DELIVERY ENGINE
- SPEED, RESILIENCE AND RISK REDUCTION
Modernization helps organizations manage the inherent tension between delivering new software features quickly and maintaining long-term sustainability. While business leaders prioritize speed, flexibility and competitive advantage, technical teams must grapple with quality issues, brittle architectures and technical debt. These forces create a perpetual tug-of-war that slows progress over time.
INCREASED TECHNICAL DEBT: Accumulating technical debt isn’t a failure of discipline, but a predictable response to pressure. Because business needs come first, modernization and quality-focused initiatives inevitably take a backseat. While teams may be able to meet the demand for new features and functionalities, an accelerated pace often causes technical debt to snowball.
LEADERSHIP BLIND SPOTS: Organizational leaders tend to underestimate the size of the development backlog and the organizational changes required to address it. Without confronting these realities and their underlying causes, efforts to address the backlog are likely to stall. Another common pitfall is modernizing technologies without upskilling the people who will use them.
DECLINING QUALITY: When organizations prioritize speed without proper support, teams may spend more time fixing issues than building new capabilities. A focus on speed can actually slow work down by increasing rework and outages. Artificial intelligence adds complexity: 61% of developers say it often produces code that looks correct but isn’t reliable.
WORKFLOW CONSTRAINTS: More than one-fifth (21%) of development teams are constrained by legacy systems or have significant process and infrastructure deficiencies. Compared with high performers, they experience more friction, burnout and software instability, as well as lower throughput. These foundational problems inhibit the quality, speed and flexibility that organizations need to achieve a competitive advantage.
SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS: Organizations resolve these challenges by modernizing platforms as well as people, processes and decision-making models. Lean, agile practices enable transparency into backlogs and capacity. Cloud-native architectures decouple systems and accelerate change. Automation reduces bottlenecks and variability. Together, these elements shift organizations from reactive delivery to intentional flow and higher-quality outcomes.
Click Below To Continue Reading
CDW’s Digital Velocity Factory can guide organizations in every aspect of software engineering modernization, from initial assessments and design recommendations to implementation, staff augmentation and post-deployment optimization.
CDW’s experts work with stakeholders and key sponsors to understand where the organization is today, and to develop a vision for the future. Common objectives include more efficient workflows, increased use of automation and AI, and faster times to market that maintain quality and reduce risk. That said, every organization is unique, and these outcomes may look different in specific environments.
Digital Velocity experts map an organization’s current state to identify outdated workflows, bottlenecks and other barriers to progress. They highlight the most critical areas for improvement and recommend solutions to help customers build a sustainable, adaptable system — one that works as technologies and business needs evolve.
These strategy sessions culminate in a custom roadmap that provides a clear path forward. Often, customers opt to use CDW’s experts to train and coach teams in the use of new systems and best practices for leveraging cloud-native architecture, automation, AI and agile development. This support ensures that customers not only deploy solutions, but also empower their teams to accelerate, innovate and drive the business forward.
The pace of technological change has made flexibility essential for modern software development. Organizations need a System for Building Systems that can adapt as business objectives and technology requirements evolve. What doesn’t change is the need to align business goals with engineering realities and human capabilities.
Team capacity is a common hurdle to modernization: 71% of DevSecOps developers don’t have time to upskill, and 29% struggle to keep up with change. Modernization requires time and resources, and most organizations find it difficult to modernize while also managing daily development work. In practice, organizations must address all these needs simultaneously, and that’s what CDW’s Digital Velocity Factory is designed to do.
The Digital Velocity Factory doesn’t approach modernization as a series of disconnected initiatives. Instead, it establishes a durable software delivery engine grounded in lean, agile practices, cloud-native architecture and pervasive automation. That foundation provides the flexibility and resilience that organizations need to modernize software delivery capabilities today, and the ability to adapt those strengths to support future needs.
CLOUD-NATIVE ARCHITECTURE: When organizations approach modernization as a System for Building Systems, the ultimate goal is a software engineering system that can flex as needed. Individual applications come and go, but the ability to design, build and evolve software becomes a lasting asset. By replacing outdated systems that generate high costs and technical debt, organizations can invest in solutions that drive flexibility, scalability and quality.
Cloud-native architecture lets teams build and run scalable applications across public, private and hybrid clouds. Cloud solutions can be set up faster than traditional architectures while also enabling the use of containers to accelerate software delivery and increase consistency, Infrastructure as Code to automate deployments and streamline workflows, and Policy as Code to enforce governance and compliance policies.
AGILE DEVELOPMENT: Agile development is a key operational model for modern software engineering that works in concert with cloud-native infrastructure to organize and deliver work faster and more efficiently. As organizations begin their modernization journey, agile principles should drive a clear definition of backlogs, realistic capacity planning and candid conversations between business and IT stakeholders about how to prioritize this work. Organizations can then iteratively accomplish these tasks to achieve value continuously rather than tackling large batches that can exceed teams’ capacity.
An agile, iterative approach lets organizations shift to continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Fewer siloes and increased collaboration help teams release and refine updates more quickly, reducing the amount and business impact of extensive rework.
Click Below To Continue Reading
AUTOMATION: Automation streamlines workflows across the development ecosystem, from infrastructure provisioning to software testing and deployment. It reduces manual tasks and human errors, facilitating speed without sacrificing control. Automation also increases consistency across development, testing and production environments, decreasing the risk of configuration drift and other issues. It aligns with agile approaches by allowing for faster feedback that lets teams iterate quickly and release features at a higher cadence.
AI is quickly becoming a part of development workflows, enhancing automation by predicting quality issues, and prioritizing tests and other functions. However, AI performs markedly better when it is integrated into environments that have achieved data maturity and established disciplined engineering systems that keep humans firmly in the loop.
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT: Organizations must develop the internal capabilities to continuously improve their software engineering processes. After building a system that is lean, agile and efficient, teams must maintain and evolve those attributes as technologies, market conditions and organizational needs change. While a Digital Velocity Factory empowers organizations with the speed and the flexibility to address these demands, sustainable change is incremental — making it imperative to modernize people as well as systems.
External partners can play a pivotal role by helping organizations modernize teams and operating models through staff augmentation, training and organizational change management. CDW’s experts work closely with an organization’s teams to increase their capacity and develop their skills and knowledge base to practice modern software development.
Organizations that modernize software development gain faster delivery, stronger teams and the resilience to compete in a rapidly changing market.
SOLUTION COMPONENTS: Modern software engineering rests on a connected ecosystem, with solutions working together to reduce the friction that slows down innovation. Cloud platforms provide a scalable, resilient foundation for engineering applications, while AI and data services drive insight and intelligent automation across the development lifecycle. Embedded security controls and practices ensure that code, pipelines and production environments are protected.
Custom application development and enterprise application and integration services modernize platforms and remove siloes that inhibit efficiency and collaboration. Digital experience work ensures that development tools support intuitive, consistent processes and reduce manual tasks that consume time and increase the risk of errors. Enterprise service management adds structure and automation to requests, changes and incidents so that teams can move faster while maintaining discipline.
RISK REDUCTION: Organizations that modernize software development with the help of experienced partners often achieve faster ROI and more sustainable progress, while also building teams that have the skills and knowledge to guide ongoing improvements. Critically, a partner can help organizations avoid costly missteps that first-time modernizers often encounter. For example, organizations often underestimate the complexity of migrating to cloud-native infrastructure and the importance of creating a strategic roadmap that aligns technology with business objectives. Organizations may also lack the internal expertise to properly integrate security and automation capabilities at the outset.
CDW’s Digital Velocity Factory experts can provide support at every step, helping organizations reduce risk and improve outcomes by modernizing holistically across people, processes and technology.
Click Below To Continue Reading
SPEED AND RESILIENCE: Acceleration is a powerful outcome of modernization, made possible when organizations can leverage proven patterns, experienced talent and repeatable methods to move faster with less friction. By making technical debt and development backlogs manageable, modernization increases teams’ ability to accommodate new requests and ultimately serve the organization as a strategic resource: nimble, responsible and quality-focused.
Business resilience and competitiveness are also significant outcomes. In an environment defined by constant disruption, resilience comes not from predicting the future but from being able to adapt continuously. Organizations that have a System for Building Systems — scalable software delivery that supports growth — can navigate change more effectively, reduce time to market and outpace the competition.
AI ADOPTION DONE RIGHT: Organizations’ success in adopting AI-assisted software development is largely determined by their data maturity: Average maturity tends to yield smaller gains from AI, while AI can drive medium to large performance gains in healthy or extremely healthy data ecosystems.
While AI potentially can reduce technical debt, 53% of developers reported that AI increased technical debt by generating code that was unreliable despite appearing correct. Moreover, AI can present real risks: 57% of developers worry about AI usage exposing sensitive data, and 37% of DevSecOps professionals said security vulnerabilities in AI-generated code were a challenge.
CDW’s Digital Velocity Factory can help organizations build a framework for integrating AI into software engineering safely and securely.
- SOFTWARE ENGINEERING CHALLENGES
- REPEATABLE SOFTWARE DELIVERY ENGINE
- SPEED, RESILIENCE AND RISK REDUCTION
Modernization helps organizations manage the inherent tension between delivering new software features quickly and maintaining long-term sustainability. While business leaders prioritize speed, flexibility and competitive advantage, technical teams must grapple with quality issues, brittle architectures and technical debt. These forces create a perpetual tug-of-war that slows progress over time.
INCREASED TECHNICAL DEBT: Accumulating technical debt isn’t a failure of discipline, but a predictable response to pressure. Because business needs come first, modernization and quality-focused initiatives inevitably take a backseat. While teams may be able to meet the demand for new features and functionalities, an accelerated pace often causes technical debt to snowball.
LEADERSHIP BLIND SPOTS: Organizational leaders tend to underestimate the size of the development backlog and the organizational changes required to address it. Without confronting these realities and their underlying causes, efforts to address the backlog are likely to stall. Another common pitfall is modernizing technologies without upskilling the people who will use them.
DECLINING QUALITY: When organizations prioritize speed without proper support, teams may spend more time fixing issues than building new capabilities. A focus on speed can actually slow work down by increasing rework and outages. Artificial intelligence adds complexity: 61% of developers say it often produces code that looks correct but isn’t reliable.
WORKFLOW CONSTRAINTS: More than one-fifth (21%) of development teams are constrained by legacy systems or have significant process and infrastructure deficiencies. Compared with high performers, they experience more friction, burnout and software instability, as well as lower throughput. These foundational problems inhibit the quality, speed and flexibility that organizations need to achieve a competitive advantage.
SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS: Organizations resolve these challenges by modernizing platforms as well as people, processes and decision-making models. Lean, agile practices enable transparency into backlogs and capacity. Cloud-native architectures decouple systems and accelerate change. Automation reduces bottlenecks and variability. Together, these elements shift organizations from reactive delivery to intentional flow and higher-quality outcomes.
Click Below To Continue Reading
CDW’s Digital Velocity Factory can guide organizations in every aspect of software engineering modernization, from initial assessments and design recommendations to implementation, staff augmentation and post-deployment optimization.
CDW’s experts work with stakeholders and key sponsors to understand where the organization is today, and to develop a vision for the future. Common objectives include more efficient workflows, increased use of automation and AI, and faster times to market that maintain quality and reduce risk. That said, every organization is unique, and these outcomes may look different in specific environments.
Digital Velocity experts map an organization’s current state to identify outdated workflows, bottlenecks and other barriers to progress. They highlight the most critical areas for improvement and recommend solutions to help customers build a sustainable, adaptable system — one that works as technologies and business needs evolve.
These strategy sessions culminate in a custom roadmap that provides a clear path forward. Often, customers opt to use CDW’s experts to train and coach teams in the use of new systems and best practices for leveraging cloud-native architecture, automation, AI and agile development. This support ensures that customers not only deploy solutions, but also empower their teams to accelerate, innovate and drive the business forward.
The pace of technological change has made flexibility essential for modern software development. Organizations need a System for Building Systems that can adapt as business objectives and technology requirements evolve. What doesn’t change is the need to align business goals with engineering realities and human capabilities.
Team capacity is a common hurdle to modernization: 71% of DevSecOps developers don’t have time to upskill, and 29% struggle to keep up with change. Modernization requires time and resources, and most organizations find it difficult to modernize while also managing daily development work. In practice, organizations must address all these needs simultaneously, and that’s what CDW’s Digital Velocity Factory is designed to do.
The Digital Velocity Factory doesn’t approach modernization as a series of disconnected initiatives. Instead, it establishes a durable software delivery engine grounded in lean, agile practices, cloud-native architecture and pervasive automation. That foundation provides the flexibility and resilience that organizations need to modernize software delivery capabilities today, and the ability to adapt those strengths to support future needs.
CLOUD-NATIVE ARCHITECTURE: When organizations approach modernization as a System for Building Systems, the ultimate goal is a software engineering system that can flex as needed. Individual applications come and go, but the ability to design, build and evolve software becomes a lasting asset. By replacing outdated systems that generate high costs and technical debt, organizations can invest in solutions that drive flexibility, scalability and quality.
Cloud-native architecture lets teams build and run scalable applications across public, private and hybrid clouds. Cloud solutions can be set up faster than traditional architectures while also enabling the use of containers to accelerate software delivery and increase consistency, Infrastructure as Code to automate deployments and streamline workflows, and Policy as Code to enforce governance and compliance policies.
AGILE DEVELOPMENT: Agile development is a key operational model for modern software engineering that works in concert with cloud-native infrastructure to organize and deliver work faster and more efficiently. As organizations begin their modernization journey, agile principles should drive a clear definition of backlogs, realistic capacity planning and candid conversations between business and IT stakeholders about how to prioritize this work. Organizations can then iteratively accomplish these tasks to achieve value continuously rather than tackling large batches that can exceed teams’ capacity.
An agile, iterative approach lets organizations shift to continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Fewer siloes and increased collaboration help teams release and refine updates more quickly, reducing the amount and business impact of extensive rework.
Click Below To Continue Reading
AUTOMATION: Automation streamlines workflows across the development ecosystem, from infrastructure provisioning to software testing and deployment. It reduces manual tasks and human errors, facilitating speed without sacrificing control. Automation also increases consistency across development, testing and production environments, decreasing the risk of configuration drift and other issues. It aligns with agile approaches by allowing for faster feedback that lets teams iterate quickly and release features at a higher cadence.
AI is quickly becoming a part of development workflows, enhancing automation by predicting quality issues, and prioritizing tests and other functions. However, AI performs markedly better when it is integrated into environments that have achieved data maturity and established disciplined engineering systems that keep humans firmly in the loop.
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT: Organizations must develop the internal capabilities to continuously improve their software engineering processes. After building a system that is lean, agile and efficient, teams must maintain and evolve those attributes as technologies, market conditions and organizational needs change. While a Digital Velocity Factory empowers organizations with the speed and the flexibility to address these demands, sustainable change is incremental — making it imperative to modernize people as well as systems.
External partners can play a pivotal role by helping organizations modernize teams and operating models through staff augmentation, training and organizational change management. CDW’s experts work closely with an organization’s teams to increase their capacity and develop their skills and knowledge base to practice modern software development.
Organizations that modernize software development gain faster delivery, stronger teams and the resilience to compete in a rapidly changing market.
SOLUTION COMPONENTS: Modern software engineering rests on a connected ecosystem, with solutions working together to reduce the friction that slows down innovation. Cloud platforms provide a scalable, resilient foundation for engineering applications, while AI and data services drive insight and intelligent automation across the development lifecycle. Embedded security controls and practices ensure that code, pipelines and production environments are protected.
Custom application development and enterprise application and integration services modernize platforms and remove siloes that inhibit efficiency and collaboration. Digital experience work ensures that development tools support intuitive, consistent processes and reduce manual tasks that consume time and increase the risk of errors. Enterprise service management adds structure and automation to requests, changes and incidents so that teams can move faster while maintaining discipline.
RISK REDUCTION: Organizations that modernize software development with the help of experienced partners often achieve faster ROI and more sustainable progress, while also building teams that have the skills and knowledge to guide ongoing improvements. Critically, a partner can help organizations avoid costly missteps that first-time modernizers often encounter. For example, organizations often underestimate the complexity of migrating to cloud-native infrastructure and the importance of creating a strategic roadmap that aligns technology with business objectives. Organizations may also lack the internal expertise to properly integrate security and automation capabilities at the outset.
CDW’s Digital Velocity Factory experts can provide support at every step, helping organizations reduce risk and improve outcomes by modernizing holistically across people, processes and technology.
Click Below To Continue Reading
SPEED AND RESILIENCE: Acceleration is a powerful outcome of modernization, made possible when organizations can leverage proven patterns, experienced talent and repeatable methods to move faster with less friction. By making technical debt and development backlogs manageable, modernization increases teams’ ability to accommodate new requests and ultimately serve the organization as a strategic resource: nimble, responsible and quality-focused.
Business resilience and competitiveness are also significant outcomes. In an environment defined by constant disruption, resilience comes not from predicting the future but from being able to adapt continuously. Organizations that have a System for Building Systems — scalable software delivery that supports growth — can navigate change more effectively, reduce time to market and outpace the competition.
AI ADOPTION DONE RIGHT: Organizations’ success in adopting AI-assisted software development is largely determined by their data maturity: Average maturity tends to yield smaller gains from AI, while AI can drive medium to large performance gains in healthy or extremely healthy data ecosystems.
While AI potentially can reduce technical debt, 53% of developers reported that AI increased technical debt by generating code that was unreliable despite appearing correct. Moreover, AI can present real risks: 57% of developers worry about AI usage exposing sensitive data, and 37% of DevSecOps professionals said security vulnerabilities in AI-generated code were a challenge.
CDW’s Digital Velocity Factory can help organizations build a framework for integrating AI into software engineering safely and securely.
CDW’s Digital Velocity Factory can help your organization modernize its software development capabilities and accelerate innovation.
Jon Anhold
CDW Expert
Rolf W. Reitzig
CDW Expert