Inspire, develop, and guide a winning organization.
Create visible workflows to achieve well-architected software.
Understand and use meaningful data to measure success.
Integrate and automate quality, security, and compliance into daily work.
Understand the unique values and behaviors of a successful organization.
LLMs and Generative AI in the enterprise.
An on-demand learning experience from the people who brought you The Phoenix Project, Team Topologies, Accelerate, and more.
Learn how making work visible, value stream management, and flow metrics can affect change in your organization.
Clarify team interactions for fast flow using simple sense-making approaches and tools.
Multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and bestselling author Gene Kim hosts enterprise technology and business leaders.
In the first part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University.
In the first episode of Season 2 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Admiral John Richardson, who served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years.
New half-day virtual events with live watch parties worldwide!
DevOps best practices, case studies, organizational change, ways of working, and the latest thinking affecting business and technology leadership.
Is slowify a real word?
Could right fit help talent discover more meaning and satisfaction at work and help companies find lost productivity?
The values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, and practices of DevOps.
This post presents the four key metrics to measure software delivery performance.
October 3, 2020
Conferences are magical.
I owe so much of my career to conferences. Over the past 20 years, I’ve learned so much from the best in the game sharing what they know, spanning the domains of Dev, Ops, Infosec, Audit, and eventually, DevOps!
In fact, I met almost all of my collaborators, and all of my coauthors at a conference, because conferences are where you meet kindred spirits and fellow travelers — people who share similar goals, who experience similar frustrations and struggles, who form a community of beliefs and practices.
And what I learned at DevOps Enterprise Summit London-Virtual is that virtual conferences can have a very similar magic as physical conferences — there are differences, of course, but it shows that communities are still communities, even if they can’t meet in person.
This experience also reinforces my belief that conferences fulfill a need that so many of us have: we want to learn and connect with fellow travelers.
In short, I thought our London-Virtual conference was the best we’ve ever put together — and I have no doubt that the program we’ve put together for you in Las Vegas-Virtual will be even better! In this post, I’ll share with you my highlights.
“I’ve been in person to the 2017 DOES London… and I have to say that I have enjoyed this virtual experience more. It was easier to keep track of what is going on, to engage with other attendees in the Zoom sessions, I had more “hallway” conversations than 3 years ago. And the talks have been just superb.”Jiří Klouda, Technology Leader, SRE, Cisco MerakiLondon-Virtual 2020 Attendee
“I’ve been in person to the 2017 DOES London… and I have to say that I have enjoyed this virtual experience more. It was easier to keep track of what is going on, to engage with other attendees in the Zoom sessions, I had more “hallway” conversations than 3 years ago. And the talks have been just superb.”
“I absolutely loved the whole thing. I enjoyed the talks so much that I just finished watching all of the breakout sessions that I didn’t get to watch during the conference. Seeing what others were learning in the Slack channels helped point me towards new ideas I hadn’t thought of before. I got opportunities to talk to fellow attendees and pages of notes. I interacted with some of those same speakers and authors I had already been learning from when I decided to attend! There were so many people excited to talk about the things I’m excited about!”Daniel Cahill, Software Engineer, Ontario SystemsLondon-Virtual 2020 Attendee
“I absolutely loved the whole thing. I enjoyed the talks so much that I just finished watching all of the breakout sessions that I didn’t get to watch during the conference. Seeing what others were learning in the Slack channels helped point me towards new ideas I hadn’t thought of before. I got opportunities to talk to fellow attendees and pages of notes. I interacted with some of those same speakers and authors I had already been learning from when I decided to attend! There were so many people excited to talk about the things I’m excited about!”
“Even after shifting to a virtual format, DevOps Enterprise Summit delivered yet another successful event and more than justified its position as the leading conference in the DevOps world.”GitLabLondon-Virtual 2020, Virtual BFF Sponsor
“Even after shifting to a virtual format, DevOps Enterprise Summit delivered yet another successful event and more than justified its position as the leading conference in the DevOps world.”
“If you’re curious about the latest on DevOps in the real world, you simply can’t get better than #DOES, and this year was no exception!”Steve Pereira, Founder, VisibleLondon-Virtual 2020 Attendee
“If you’re curious about the latest on DevOps in the real world, you simply can’t get better than #DOES, and this year was no exception!”
I’m so excited that we have the most senior leaders speaking at this conference — this shows that the work being done in this community matters, to people who matter. And we have experts who will teach us things that I believe every technology leader needs to know.
First, let’s talk about the experience reports —
Maya Leibman (Executive VP and CIO, American Airlines) and Ross Clanton (Managing Director, Chief Architect of Technology Transformation, American Airlines) https://sched.co/e2ah
Last year, I was so delighted to learn that our longtime friend Ross Clanton was joining American Airlines, to work for CIO Maya Liebman, who I met in 2016. They will be presenting together about the amazing American Airlines journey, sharing how they are changing how technology work is performed, and why it’s so important now.
Ken Kennedy (Executive VP and President, Technology and Product, CSG) and Scott Prugh (Chief Architect & SVP Software Engineering, CSG) https://sched.co/e2aw
Scott Prugh is the only person who has presented every year at this conference, and this year, he will be presenting with his boss, Ken Kennedy, EVP and President, Technology and Product. Ken will talk about the value of the work that Scott and his team has done, and how to convince executive management on the importance of DevOps.
Kimberly Johnson (Executive VP and COO, Fannie Mae):. https://sched.co/e2fA
Kimberly Johnson, EVP and COO of Fannie Mae, has a reputation of being asked to solve the toughest problems facing the organization. Her story of how she ended up being responsible for the technology function is profound, changing how technology is integrated into business strategy and operations. She will be teaching us what she thinks every technology leader needs to know.
She will be joined by:
Lauren Knausenberger (Deputy Chief Information Officer, United States Air Force) and Adam Furtado (Chief of Platform, Kessel Run, United States Air Force) https://sched.co/e9zu
Kessel Run is an amazing effort in the US Air Force, building software very differently than how it’s been typically done for the last 30 years, deploying multiple times per day to support their customers. Adam Furtado, Chief of Platform and one of the KR founders, will present their origin story, co-presenting with Lauren Knausenberger, recently elevated to Deputy CIO of the US Air Force, on their collaboration.
Dwayne Holmes (Vice President of Converged Applications and Cloud, Large Bank) https://sched.co/eA00
For years, I’ve wanted Dwayne Holmes to present how, in a previous role, he containerized all the revenue generating systems for one of the largest hotel companies, which collectively supported over $30 billion of annual revenue. Supporting this work required building one of the world’s largest revenue-generating Kubernetes installations.
Werner Loots (Executive VP – Transformation, U.S. Bank, and Ian Eslick (SVP, Chief Architect for Digital Technology Strategy & Modernization, U.S. Bank) https://sched.co/eAKA
Werner Loots, EVP Transformation at U.S. Bank spoke last year about their transformation journey, and returns this year with Ian Eslick, SVP, Chief Architect for Digital Technology Strategy and Modernization, U.S. Bank. They will talk about their ever-growing number of studios, designed to deliver customer value faster, and the challenges of increasing the number business interfaces, and decreasing the number of technical interfaces, and creating engineering excellence across the enterprise.
Jon Moore (Chief Software Architect & Senior Fellow, Comcast Cable) and Michael Winslow (Senior Director, Software Development & Engineering, Comcast) https://sched.co/eRWQ
Jon Moore is Chief Software Architect and Senior Fellow at Comcast, and he will be sharing his views on the critical role of architecture in an organization that has over 3,000 software engineers. He will describe how and why they standardized the CI/CD (continuous integration and deployment) infrastructure across the organization, and Michael Winslow, Senior Director Development and Engineering, will describe how teams responded, transitioned, and eventually benefited from it.
Biswanath (Bose) Basu (Senior Business Director, Anti-Money Laundering – Machine Learning and Fraud, Capital One), Rakesh Goyal (Director, Technology Engineering, Capital One), and Jennifer Hansen (Director, Product Management Delivery Experience, Capital One) https://sched.co/eAVk
We’ve all loved the amazing experience reports from Capital One in previous years, but I’m so excited that this year, it’s being given by Boze Biswanath, Senior Business Director of Anti-Money Laundering, about his experiences transforming the card services platform, which supports one of the largest business units in the company. He will be presenting with his engineering counterpart, Rakesh Goyal, Senior Director of Technology Engineering, and Jennifer Hansen, Director of Product Management Delivery Experience.
Eileen M. Uchitelle (Staff Software Engineer, GitHub) https://sched.co/eAhe
I’m so excited that Eileen Uchitelle, Staff Software Engineer at GitHub, will tell the amazing, heroic seven-year journey to migrate from Rails 2 to Rails 5, and the increasingly dire problems that made it so urgent. She will describe the amazing benefits that resulted, and she gives advice that every technology needs to hear about the hidden cost of not staying up-to-date on open source dependencies, and what is required to stay current.
Dr. J. Goosby Smith (Assistant Provost Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Associate Professor Management, Baker School of Business, and Director of Truth Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) Center, The Citadel): https://sched.co/eBDc
I loved her book when I read it 3 yrs ago, but I thought it was about diversity.
Driven by the call to “increase human thriving in the workplace,” Dr. J Goosby Smith specializes in workplace inclusion, with emphasis on teams, higher education, veterans, and workplace spirituality and religion. She conducted an incredible study of over 7,000 respondents, in a quest to understand the elements of inclusion, where individuals help teams create greatness. I’m so excited that she will be teaching us what she’s learned, and she’ll also be leading an incredible panel that will be of interest to anyone who is responsible for hiring talented engineers of the future: https://sched.co/eVF8
Joining Dr. Goosby Smith on the panel:
David Silverman (Founder and CEO, CrossLead) and Jessica Reif (Director of Research & Development, CrossLead Inc.): https://sched.co/e2b0
I’m a huge fan of the book Team of Teams, and so I’m so delighted that one of the co-authors, David Silverman, CEO and founder of CrossLead, will be presenting. He presented at our London-Virtual conference, and I’ve asked him to return to present more learnings and patterns that were discussed in the book. He will be joined by his colleague, Jessica Reif, Director of R&D, who comes from a software background, and they’ll describe how these patterns can be applied to any modern organization.
Jonathan Smart (Author, Sooner Safer Happier): https://sched.co/eA0W
For many years, Jonathan Smart led the Ways of Working at Barclays, where he described DevOps as creating value, “Better Value Sooner, Safer, and Happier,” which is my favorite definition for what we do. It’s also the title of his amazing new book. He will describe how radically management and leadership have changed in the past 100 years, and I think his book will be viewed as an important contribution to organizational learning, and predict that in 10 years, it will be mandatory reading in MBA curriculums. He is now Partner of Business Agility at Deloitte.
John Allspaw (Principal, Founder, Adaptive Capacity Labs): https://sched.co/eAJR
Certainly almost everyone in the DevOps community knows the name John Allspaw. If there was a starting gun in the DevOps movement, it was the famous talk at the Velocity Conference in 2009, where John Allspaw (then VP Ops at Flickr) and Paul Hammond (Director of Dev in the Yahoo! Mothership) talked about doing 10 deploys a day. What dazzles me about John’s recent work is he believes that by understanding how organizations handle incidents, we can gain incredible clues on how organizations learn. He gives incredibly valuable advice to both technology leaders and practitioners.
John Cutler (Head of Product Research & Education, Amplitude) and Peter Moore (President, Wild Oak Enterprises): https://sched.co/e2fG
I think John Cutler, Head of Product Research & Education, is doing some of the most innovative thinking in the field of product and design — I’ve asked him to talk about how organizations can use technology and design to win in the marketplace.
Peter Moore, President of Wild Oak Enterprises, will be teaching us about Core vs. Context, a concept that shows up prominently in “The Unicorn Project”, and how technology leaders can be perceived as a strategic asset, as opposed to a cost burden.
Dr. Nicole Forsgren (VP Research & Strategy, GitHub): https://sched.co/eAKN
Dr. Nicole Forsgren’s work is familiar to almost everyone in the DevOps movement — I’ve had the privilege of working with her and Jez Humble on the State of DevOps research since 2013, which was the basis of the Shingo Publication Award-winning book, “Accelerate”.
She is now VP of Research and Strategy at GitHub, and I’m so delighted that she is presenting a lecture on her recent research that is relevant to every technology leader today, which is how COVID-19 and working from home is impacting productivity, organizational and employee health. She’ll have advice for leaders and where we go from here.
Erica Morrison (Executive Director of Software Development & Operations, CSG): https://sched.co/eAIy
I suspect you haven’t heard a presentation like the one Erica Morrison will share about an outage, so riveting and heart-wrenching, because it lays bare problems that almost all of us have faced in our career. She provides lessons learned and teachings about how they’ve adopted incident command practices — anyone who has had to fix production incidents under extreme pressure will so much appreciate this talk.Other amazing keynotes we have planned:
At DevOps Enterprise Summit, we focus on two types of talks in the general session:
To use Brian Eno’s “scenius” language, the general session is where we celebrate successes in the community through experience reports, rapidly disseminate winning tools and techniques and ways of thinking, share anonymized stories of what ideas or practices didn’t work or resulted in outright failures (“DevOps Confessions”), and bring in the best experts for the problems identified by the community.
The General Session is the portion of the conference where the “Dungeon Master (DM)” controls the campaign, where the DM sets the stage and makes sure all the players hear and experience the same thing. I take enormous pride in the fact that in previous years we’ve brought to you some incredible talks in the general session, which I feel have helped move our industry forward:
Below are many of the general session talks that we’re all very excited about on the Programming Committee.
One important lesson we’ve learned is that perhaps the most important feature of any conference is to have opportunities for attendees to connect with, and learn from, one another and the presenters.
I must say, the feedback from attendees in creating this dedicated time for networking has been overwhelmingly positive. And even more so, the networking time during the presentations proved to be a hit at our London – Virtual event. Having speakers available for Q&A on Slack while their talks aired opened up a new form of interaction that is only available in a virtual format.
To that end, my friend Jeff Gallimore and I have established different ways for people to learn, and ask/answer as many questions as possible. We believe the quality of the audience is something that separates DevOps Enterprise Summit from other conferences, and the more we can incentivize interactions amongst attendees, the better. Here are the formats you can take advantage of during the three-day event:
As you can see, the conference is more than just the talks, which is why we’ve created structured and unstructured networking formats to offer you the most well-rounded, virtual experience possible.
There will be a lot to cover in three days but I hope we can all take the journey together. DevOps Enterprise Summit is a conference for you – the technology leaders and practitioners at large, complex organizations implementing DevOps principles and practices.
While we will certainly miss seeing you all in-person in Vegas this year, we have put together an amazing virtual event that captures so much of the magic of our in-person event, and some new elements that can only be done online. I am confident that this will be our best DevOps Enterprise Summit ever!
To preview the DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas – Virtual and learn more about the conference, please watch previous videos of our presentations, download the past speakers’ slide decks, and view photos from all past events.
As a thanks for taking the time to read this article, use code GENESARTICLEREADERS for $150 off your registration.
Cheers!Gene
Gene Kim is a best-selling author whose books have sold over 1 million copies. He authored the widely acclaimed book "The Unicorn Project," which became a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Additionally, he co-authored several other influential works, including "The Phoenix Project," "The DevOps Handbook," and the award-winning "Accelerate," which received the prestigious Shingo Publication Award. His latest book, “Wiring the Winning Organization,” co-authored with Dr. Steven Spear, was released in November 2023.
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