What to Expect at Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit Europe Virtual

Holy cow, Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit Europe Virtual is happening next week, and I’m super excited about the programming that we have planned. We have a lot of exciting new experience reports lined up and a bunch of subject matter experts joining us, many of whom you can learn more about below!

An Architect’s Agile Journey: Insights and Lessons from Medtronic’s Surgical Robotics Division

Luca Ingianni — Consultant, Trainer, Engineer
Tom Baker — Robot Behavior Software Architect, Medtronic

One of the things that excited me so much about this presentation is how they experimented with very different ways for system architects to work with hundreds of engineers. They explore how one creates the ideal working environment to push the frontiers of what is possible for building and operating surgical robots, which definitely qualifies as a safety-critical, cyber-physical system that must operate in a highly regulated industry.

Pfizer’s Future of Development

Laura Tacho — CTO at DX
Jamie Hook — Platform DevOps Lead, Pfizer

Over the past decade, we’ve had experience reports from nearly every industry vertical; however, one notable absence is from the pharmaceutical industry, which was so important for society to regain normalcy after the global pandemic.

That is why I’m so excited about this amazing presentation about how developer experience became so critical at Pfizer and how they helped their organization win, eventually helping thousands of developers across the organization.

Bridging the Gap Between the IT Revolution Community Library and the Reality of a Large Industrial Company

Olivier Jacques — Sr DevOps and Cloud Architect, AWS
Claude Ampigny — Sr Customer Delivery Architect, AWS
Clément Sabater — Delivery Manager, EDF

I’m super excited that we have another fantastic experience report from a large industrial organization that provides critical infrastructure and, thus, is highly regulated. They will provide a behind-the-scenes view of the digitalization program and how they adopted innovative strategies such as the “You Build It, You Run It” model, “Team Topologies” for organizations, and Amazon’s efficient operational mechanisms. These approaches are part of their broader effort to enhance innovation and streamline processes, co-presented with a long-time member of the community, Olivier Jacques.

How We Are Wiring Winning Organizations at Visma

Mili Orucevic — Chief Software Quality Engineer, Visma Software International
Alin Iacob — Cloud Architect, Visma Software International

This session is about how Visma, one of Europe’s largest providers of business-critical cloud software, is able to continuously wire winning organizations at scale through transformations in culture, engineering, and security by utilizing the principles of slowification, amplification, and simplification to create amazing improvements that help their organization win. 

ReWiring the TelCo Operating Model: Learnings from Telenet

Barbara Arnst — Transformation Leader – Organization Designer, Telenet (LibertyGlobal)

Telenet, a leading Belgian telecommunications provider, adopted an agile-at-scale operating model across its Business and IT sectors in 2019. Since then, the company has embarked on an intensive learning journey to achieve true business agility. Most recently, Telenet revamped its operating model, reorienting the entire organization toward customer-centricity and positioning software as central to its operations. This talk offers an open reflection on the past 12 months of this journey, exploring which paradigm shifts were embraced by their leadership, which were more challenging, and why. It also discusses key takeaways for other leaders from this experience.

A Benchmark Of How Hundreds of Organizations Are Wired and Mis-wired

Sam Yeats — Founder & CEO, TeamForm

In this presentation, Sam talks about his work benchmarking hundreds of organizations, uncovering how organizations create strategies, fund programs, set goals, organize, manage siloes, execute, and the problems that result. He discusses common patterns and configurations, and how nearly all organizations are missing some piece of critical “wiring.” He offers insights into addressing these patterns and suggests actionable steps for leaders to take.

How Parloa Revolutionized Customer Support with Europe’s Largest GenAI Conversational FAQ

Stefan Ostwald — Co-Founder & CTO, Parloa
Peter Petrovics — Strategic Advisor, Equal Experts

Over the last twelve months, I’ve been super-excited about how many experience reports we’ve had from technology leaders as they experiment with and adopt AI technologies. Here’s a fantastic experience report about launching one of Europe’s largest GenAI-driven conversational FAQ services for a multinational enterprise with 50MM customers in 30 countries. They will talk about major hurdles, including those of “hallucinations” and privacy concerns, and how they overcame them.

New Grads Becoming New SREs: Catalyzing a “Circle of Life” in Ireland

Jennifer Petoff, PhD — Director, Google Cloud Platform and Technical Infrastructure Education

I’m excited about this session because this is a community that has adopted SRE principles and patterns at large scale. However, many have noted that SREs often require people with considerable experience. In fact, the 2019 StackOverflow Developer Survey noted that “DevOps specialists and SREs are among the highest paid, most experienced, and most satisfied with their jobs.”

Dr. Jennifer Petoff describes what the Google SRE organization is doing to create a new talent pipeline, focusing on universities and new engineers!

First-Time Engineering Manager Experiences

Akash Rajendra Ventekar — Engineering Manager, Comcast
Quincy Iheme — Engineering Manager, Comcast

This is a community that has focused on the progression of technology leaders, and it’s been amazing to see how their careers and areas of responsibility have grown over the past decade. However, I can personally attest that going from an individual contributor to a management role is a huge leap.

This is why we’re so delighted with this submission from Akash and Quincy on their challenges and learnings making this transition and the resources they drew upon. I think this is such a fantastic topic, and I’m delighted that they’re part of the program.

How a Major Organizational Shift Initiated a DevOps Transformation at Daimler Truck

Michael Vormittag — Head of SAP Delivery, Architecture, Analytics & CTO Office, Daimler Truck
Marko Klemetti — CTO, Eficode

In 2022, Daimler Truck was spun off from Mercedes-Benz to become the world’s largest independent truck and bus manufacturer. This separation opened the door to creating a modern development environment, emphasizing Developer Experience and adopting a DevOps culture. In this experience report, they will describe a unified developer platform called The Truck Toolchain (T3). This platform is designed to enhance Developer Experience and pave the way for future technical innovations, including GenAI-based tooling.

They describe the process of separating a massive business unit, including its R&D and developer tooling components. Additionally, they share valuable insights gained from this experience that are relevant to any organization in the process of building or refining their developer platforms.

Organizing for Outcomes

Jon Smart — Founder, Business Agility Coach, Sooner Safer Happier

Throughout the years, I have learned so much from Jon. And he, like so many of us in this community, is thinking about how we create organizational structures that foster positive outcomes rather than hinder them.

Jon is now working on a new book, delving into the centuries of advancement of ways of working. He will be sharing some of the amazing things he has learned, and he’ll offer insights that resonate deeply with my own experiences while working on Wiring the Winning Organization.

From Mass Manufacturing to Mass Innovation

Willem van Lammeren — Technical Lead Industrial IT, Solvay (Previous: Manager Industrial IT at BASF)
David Ariens — Manager, Analytics for Industry; Author, The IT/OT Insider (Previous: Director Industrial Digitalization at BASF)

I’m so excited about this presentation describing a significant challenge in the manufacturing industry—productivity has stalled despite ongoing technological advancements, which is attributed to perpetual pilot projects and the growing divide between IT and operational technology. The presentation proposes a structured approach to bridge this gap, starting with fostering cooperation, applying team topologies to improve workflows, and finally introducing agile and DevOps methodologies. This strategy aims to enhance manufacturing productivity by better integrating IT innovations directly into operational practices.

Revolutionising Mainframe Developer Experience using Empathy and Design Thinking

Bharghava Bhogireddy — Senior Operations Architect, Legal and General
Jennifer Pickard — Head of Engineering, Legal and General
Tariq Surty — Director of IT, Legal and General

Legal & General (L&G) is one of the UK’s largest financial services and asset management companies. This experience report describes their initiative to overhaul the company’s mainframe engineering and delivery systems. By incorporating modern engineering practices, cloud technologies, and advanced data handling, the project seeks to enhance both the speed and quality of service delivery. A key focus is to improve the developer experience and eliminate the requirement for mainframe expertise. This approach is intended to help L&G attract and retain top engineering talent while also mitigating the risk associated with reliance on key personnel.

The Maturity Model – charting the course to Requirements Excellence in DevOps

Gayathri Shriram — Agile Consultant(Unit Agile Leader), TCS
Mark Anning — Openreach Lead Agile Coach

Although requirements aren’t talked about a lot within this community, we were so intrigued by this submission. They made the case that requirements must be done well to get good outcomes from technology, and they raised some startling questions: What really defines a good requirement? Is it simply a tool for achieving mutual understanding between those who need a solution and those who provide it? It’s often said that what gets measured gets managed, but when measurement criteria turn into mere targets, a superficial checkbox mentality can dominate. So, how can we mitigate this risk?

Bootstrapping Cloud Platforms – Engineering Sustainable Business Agility

Vasileios Konofaos — Head of Delivery Service Delivery Platform, KPMG Switzerland
Nandkishor Gaikwad — Chief Architect – Technology, KPMG Switzerland

An experience report from KPMG Switzerland on their strategic pursuit of Sustainable Business Agility, and the “SwissAlps” cloud platform that resulted from it, built upon Microsoft Azure. They will present their lessons learned utilizing practices such as platform-as-a-product, the Flow Framework, DevSecOps, and Infrastructure as Code, as well as the critical role of a Swiss-hosted cloud platform in their digital strategy.

How Adopting an IT Product Mindset Changed Velux

Anna Josefin Salomonsson — Director Digital Governance, VELUX
Henrik Høegh — Senior Manager, Platform Engineering, VELUX

VELUX is a Danish manufacturing company that specializes in producing roof windows and skylights. This experience report shares how they are rethinking their internal technologies from being a cost-center to being product-led. I love this presentation because of how they vividly describe how internal capabilities are now created, in a way that is as exciting and vibrant as any startup.

Overcoming Challenges for a Successful SRE Organizational Setup

Christof Leng, PhD — SRE Engagements Product Area Lead, Google

Over the years, Christof has managed and worked on various parts of Google services, including Cloud, Ads, and internal developer tooling. I have learned so much from him about the dynamic interaction between Google SRE leadership and Dev leadership within a functional organization.

He’s now spoken at this conference 3 times, and this year, he will discuss the dynamic interaction between Google SRE leadership and Dev leadership within a functional organization.

Introducing a Product-based Approach in an Engineering-focused Container Platform Team

Stéphane Di Cesare — Platform Engineer, Platform Experience, DKB

In this session led by Stéphane Di Cesare, we’ll learn invaluable insights into navigating the complex landscape of container platform adoption. Stéphane has a background spanning platform engineering, consulting, and sales engineering and will share actionable strategies for addressing common hurdles faced when integrating container platforms into established workflows. From overcoming resistance from legacy developers skeptical of cloud-native concepts to effectively communicating the value proposition to key stakeholders, including finance teams, we will learn how to articulate the benefits of their container platform in a language that resonates across diverse audiences. 

How Cyber Threats Can Turn into an Unwanted Real-life Hollywood Blockbuster

Boris Cipot — Senior Security Engineer, Synopsys

Amid the growing influence of AI and open-source components, prioritizing security in software development has become paramount. This session aims to dispel Hollywood myths surrounding cyberattacks, delving into the genuine threats inherent in today’s software supply chain. Led by Boris Cipot, we’ll delve into best practices for fortifying software against vulnerabilities and navigating tight development schedules.

How Forto Solved Their Global Freight Trading Strategy Problem

Jacob Brank — Lead Product Manager, Forto
Andy Duncan — Head of Engineering, Equal Experts

I’m ridiculously excited about this next presentation: Forto is a logistics-tech company that set out to revolutionize the shipping industry. Jacob and Andy will describe the complexities of this industry, including procuring container shipping capacity and matching supply with demand in a rapidly fluctuating market, which the COVID-19 pandemic and the Red Sea shipping crisis contributed to. They will describe the development and impact of new tools they built to optimize some of the most important processes of the company, and all the skills and experiences required to make that happen. They will also describe the benefits they created, again, helping them not just win in the marketplace but ensure the smooth operations of an industry we all rely upon.

Optionality & The Science of Happy Accidents

Matthew McLarty — CTO, Boomi
Stephen Fishman — Global Practice Lead – Customer Success Strategy & Architecture, MuleSoft

I got to read an early copy of Stephen Fishman and Matthew McLarty’s new book, Unbundling the Enterprise, and it blew me away. It is a combination of some of my favorite books: Dr. Carliss Baldwin’s Design Rules and Eric Evans’s Domain Driven Design, with the strategic business insights akin to Good to Great and Reengineering the Corporation.

I think this is an important book, and, like Wiring the Winning Organization, is part of a Kuhnsian moment that describes how economic theory should inform how we wire our organizations and the value that it can create.

- About The Authors

Gene Kim

Gene Kim is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, researcher, and multiple award-winning CTO. He has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999 and was the founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He is the author of six books, The Unicorn Project (2019), and co-author of the Shingo Publication Award winning Accelerate (2018), The DevOps Handbook (2016), and The Phoenix Project (2013). Since 2014, he has been the founder and organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit, studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.

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