I recently attended DevOps Days in London. It was an amazing event with lots of great discussions and presentations. Some of the solutions and ideas presented were extremely creative. I spent time mingling with people who, undoubtedly, really know what they are doing.
On Saturday morning I had the pleasure of meeting Gene Kim, renowned DevOps researcher and author, and John Clapham, development lead for Nokia. Over breakfast we discussed the current state of DevOps and what could be done to help speed up DevOps adoption. My opinion is that while we have practitioner buy in, practitioners aren’t the best people to present strategic initiatives to business leaders.
The Phoenix Project, which just happens to be written by Gene, does a really good job of telling the story of how IT affects business outcomes and why DevOps is important. The story is told through the eyes of management and covers interactions between IT and many groups in the organization. No matter whether you are a hardcore techie, senior management or somewhere in between you will probably experience many “Aha!” moments and just as many moments that will bring back painful memories.
Based on our conversation, Gene decided to present a session on how technologists can better sell DevOps to management. The slides from the session can be found on slideshare.net. See also Gene’s blog post “The Construction Of ‘The Phoenix Project:’ Using The Downward Spiral To Better Sell DevOps.”
So, what are the next steps? To bring DevOps to a wider audience, there needs to be a suite of tools that are easy to use and integrate. The skill set required to chain together various tools is immense, and frankly sometimes the ingenuity shown is not something that will or should scale to the larger market.
At Serena we are making technology to support DevOps within companies more accessible, without needing an army of consultants or gurus just to achieve the basics and keep systems up and running.
Stay tuned for future articles on how to integrate commonly used tools into processes managed by Serena solutions.
