Featured Resource: Thinking Environments

Leading up to DevOps Enterprise Summit 2017 San Francisco, we’ll be releasing our most valuable DevOps resources to our community on a weekly basis.

Each of these resources come to you straight from the DevOps Enterprise Forum, where more than 50 technology leaders and thinkers gather for three days to create written guidance on the best-known methods for overcoming the top obstacles in the DevOps Enterprise community.

While the traditional IT organization is structured into functional silos, DevOps relies on empowered, cross-functional teams. Is it possible to blend the two approaches and work within the traditional structure? Or do you need to restructure your organization to support DevOps? These are questions that many of us grapple with as we travel along the DevOps transformation journey to improve our organizations.

In this week’s paper, we address questions such as these, identify some of the models that enterprises and organizations are currently using, and propose some ideas that can help leaders as they approach organization with DevOps in mind.

The four organizational models we discuss are:

1. Model 1—Traditional Functional Silo Model
   Key Characteristic: Clear single points of accountability for the quality of the individual functions, but accountability for cross-cutting concerns is only at the top (CIO) level.
2. Model 2— Matrix Mode
   Key Characteristic: This model uses a matrixed organization style, where accountability is owned by more than one reporting group.
3. Model 3— Product And Platform Model
   Key Characteristic: Teams are formed around products as de ned by the perspective of the business.
4. Model X— Adaptive Organization
   Key Characteristic: Model X is a much rarer species of organization and more than anything represents a glimpse into a future-state model that—looking at how organizations today are typically structured as a whole—lies “beyond” contemporary organizational practices and thinking.

The authors on each of these resources will be prominent figures in the industry, and on this particular one, we have six industry leaders working together. They include:

• Jason Cox, Director, Systems Engineering, The Walt Disney Company
• Mustafa Kapadia, Digital Transformation & DevOps Service Line Leader, IBM
• Chivas Nambiar, Director Systems Engineering, Verizon
• Mark Rendell, Principal Director, Accenture
• Mark Schwartz, Enterprise Strategist, Amazon Web Services
• Jonathan Snyder, Sr. Manager, Service Deployment & Quality, Adobe Systems

Here are two amazing presentations from authors on this week’s resource.

Chivas Nambiar

Mark Schwartz

If you’re eager to continue learning about these topics and more, come see how you can be a part of DevOps Enterprise Summit 2017 San Francisco. We spend three days talking with the leaders of large, complex organizations implementing DevOps principles and practices, with the goal to give leaders (like you) the tools and practices they need to develop and deploy software faster and to win in the marketplace.

- About The Authors

IT Revolution

Trusted by technology leaders worldwide. Since publishing The Phoenix Project in 2013, and launching DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2014, we’ve been assembling guidance from industry experts and top practitioners.

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