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.
August 17, 2016
DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015 in San Francisco last October felt very different from the other DevOps conferences I usually attend. It felt very exciting as well. Large organizations, typically conservative (if not secretive) in their external communications, coming forward with stories of progress and challenges in their DevOps journey. They’re leading the pack of Horses by presenting impressive numbers in terms of IT delivery and business gains.
DevOps Enterprise Summit 2016 in London was no different. Albeit focusing more on the finance and insurance sectors than its US counterpart, the stories presented were equally impressive (such as SIX’s debunking of some DevOps myths in financial industry) and motivating for anyone familiar with the intricacies and challenges of introducing change in large organizations.
Legacy? This is Legacy!
One remarkable difference between DOES US and DOES Europe is how old some of the organizations presenting in London are… Barclays, for instance, was founded in 1690, that is 86 years before US independence! Other examples go as far back as the late 18th century.
We often look at 4- or 5-year-old IT systems as legacy. The technology and tools they were built upon are no longer the best of breed. We still look at mainframes as dinosaurs (well, you might want to reconsider that one). Now imagine dealing with regulations and controls dating back hundreds of years. Legacy processes entrenched in the organization’s DNA over centuries. That is the level of challenge these organizations are facing: an archaeological excavation to remove layers of waste woven into the ways of working. Compounded, of course, by duplication and parallelization of rules and processes introduced by mergers and acquisitions.
But these organizations understand it’s now a matter of survival to tackle these challenges. The pace of innovation has never been so fast with a combination of digital services, quick delivery, and a push for inter-operability and open standards—even in traditional sectors such as banking.
Courage as Enabler for Change
“Courage is the only path to change. You will face many challenges. Fear do not.”
This message could be heard in many of the talks, as if Yoda was whispering in our ears:
We heard “DevOps is about People” repeated in presentation after presentation. Trying to change the organization via new hires is borderline impossible. So what to do?
One example came from Barclays: have the courage to scale DevOps by descaling the work first, then support local cultures/businesses by sharing principles but not prescribing practices (or tools). Provide the top-down support necessary for localized bottom-up practices to emerge, to fail, and to improve.
Clash of Civilizations – Part I
DevOps has thrived in fast-paced technical environments where open source tooling and inter-operability reign. After having reaped the benefits in standalone web and mobile apps, many large organizations are now reaching the stage where their backend systems (often using proprietary systems) are now the bottleneck to increasing delivery speed in highly coupled applications. Or, as Lyndsay Prewer from HMRC put it, “plumbing digital services into legacy back-ends.”
But if SAP can automate testing at scale and perform blue-green deployments on their cloud SAP offerings, then it looks like there’s nothing that can’t be done.
Manuel Pais is co-author of "Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow". Recognized by TechBeacon as a DevOps thought leader, Manuel is an independent IT organizational consultant and trainer, focused on team interactions, delivery practices and accelerating flow. Manuel is also a LinkedIn instructor on Continuous Delivery.
No comments found
Your email address will not be published.
First Name Last Name
Δ
Organizations face critical decisions when selecting cloud service providers (CSPs). A recent paper titled…
We're thrilled to announce the release of The Phoenix Project: A Graphic Novel (Volume…
The following post is an excerpt from the book Unbundling the Enterprise: APIs, Optionality, and…
A few years ago, Gene Kim approached me with an intriguing question: What would…