How to Embed More of the Business Outside IT with DevOps Principles

A series of advice blogs from DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 presenters.

We all know that for DevOps to truly be as successful as it can be, it’s best to get the business on board. But how do you translate something from IT to the rest of the business?

Top experts from DevOps Enterprise Summit are here to help.

“Organizations who develop software need to realize the truth that ‘Business’ and ‘IT’ are the same thing. You’d never build a car with a hard separation between marketing, design, and manufacturing. Software runs the business and if business leaders who are focusing on serving customers better are not working closely with the people doing the work to make that happen, they are losing market share to those who are. The days of the business being the customer of IT are done. Our customers buy our products. We ARE the business.”
—Bryan Finster, Value Stream Architect, Walmart DevOps Dojo, Walmart

“It takes all of use to deliver the product. Let’s figure out the best possible way to do that together.”
—Dave Mangot, Principal, Mangoteque

“Do it, deliver, and show the value of that pattern.”
—Mick Miller, Senior Product Manager, Cloud Native, KeyBank

“I would lean back on the idea of Customer Journey Mapping. This requires collaboration with product/business anyway, and will help expose and garner interest from the business side.”
—Adam Shake, Director of Site Reliability Engineering, MediaMath Source

“Show them the proof, metrics, and how other organizations have benefitted by embedding the business with these principals.”
—Christopher McFee, Director of DevOps Practices, KeyBank

“The most powerful tools IT have in spreading DevOps principle are in creating visual representations of better business outcomes. By making the invisible visible to stakeholders they can begin to engage in the scientific process of improvement which is at the heart of DevOps.”
—Jeffrey Fredrick, Coauthor of Agile Conversations

“Use Value stream mapping and get their perspective.”
—Roman Pickl, Technical Project Manager and Continuous Improvement Agent, Elektrobit

“Treat ‘non-technical’ people as technical people. If they don’t understand a concept, it’s because you’re not explaining it right. (Alternatively, if there’s really no way to explain it in a way they care about, then it probably doesn’t actually matter.)”
—David Stanke, Developer Advocate, Google

“Have the team own their production cost.”
—Jonathan Akers, Product Owner – RadioCentral, Motorola Solutions

- About The Authors

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