Companies in industries as diverse as banking and manufacturing are realizing that in order to remain competitive, they must become software-driven organizations. From customer-driven digital transformation to cloud computing for the back office, software is eating the world – one enterprise at a time.
Enterprises have depended upon software for decades, of course. What’s different now is how modern advances in information technology are increasingly able to change the fundamentals of business itself via sophisticated automation and acceleration of every aspect of the organization.
We’re gradually eliminating everything about big companies that slows them down. The result is organizations at velocity – agile enough to innovate and fast enough to deal with any change that comes their way.
Today’s better-faster-cheaper technology, however, is not the whole story, as tools are only as good as the people wielding them. The more fundamental story here is the organizational and cultural transformation necessary to take full advantage of modern tech. Business at velocity depends upon such transformation.
“CEOs don’t know what it feels like to run an organization that generates high velocity, high quality output,” according to Adam Jacob, Chief Technology Officer for infrastructure automation firm Chef Software.
As my previous article on Chef’s recent conference explained, Chef is at the center of an enterprise cultural movement known as DevOps – and Jacob is one of the primary visionaries behind the DevOps movement.
DevOps, however, has proven hard to define. “DevOps is the experience of people who are using it to transform their businesses,” Jacob says. “DevOps is unique to every person who ever tries to do it.”
Perhaps the most striking misconception about DevOps is that it is about building software – in large part due to the formation of the term as a portmanteau of “development” and “operations.” True, DevOps involves a rethink of these phases of the software lifecycle to be sure – but that’s just the beginning.
The real focus of DevOps is actually on the organization as a whole. “DevOps is reinventing how we run our businesses,” according to Jacob – not just the software organization or even the IT shop, but the entire company.
DevOps calls for self-organizing teams made up of a mix of different roles and skill sets – not just dev and ops people, but also the people responsible for the customer experience, often including product specialists, marketing people, and others.
This call for reorganization requires a profound shift in thinking, especially for executives. “The traditional hierarchical organization centers on decision making,” Jacob explains. “You’re trying to flip that over. There’s still a hierarchy, but decision making is pushed down to the bottom” – where the bottom in this case are the self-organizing teams in question, who now have the power to drive decisions across the enterprise.
What, then, is the role of the executive in this DevOps-fueled reimagining of the organization? “Leaders must care about culture and share their beliefs,” Jacob says. “Leadership is less about making the call and more about creating the context.”
This notion of context, therefore, is at the crux of how business executives must rethink their roles. Context might mean the customer context, or might also represent regulatory compliance context or competitive context, for example.
In any case, executives must push the decision making about what to do within that context down to the cross-organizational teams at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. As Jacob says, “the job of the executive is to create the space that allows DevOps to happen.”
While making these apparently radical changes to the culture and organization of a company may in the end be necessary to run the organization at velocity, such change won’t take place right away. Jacob has a good idea where to start. “Step number one: know what it feels like to lead a team that delivers in a week.”
If executives can lead small teams at velocity, then they will understand what it takes to lead a large organization at velocity – or at least, that’s the theory. The devil, of course, is in the details.
Business executives may have a difficult time getting their heads around this DevOps big picture. After all, isn’t DevOps a technology thing? “As you get better and faster,” Jacob says, “the difference between the software and business people bleeds away.” Remember, technology is at the heart of the modern enterprise. DevOps is the key to changing the culture accordingly.
The bottom line: DevOps was never about technology. It was always about people. “Talking about people first is the number one vetting criteria for whether you’re doing DevOps or not,” Jacob points out.
As DevOps expands beyond the IT shop, we may not call it DevOps any more, and that’s perfectly okay. “We don’t need to win the war of the DevOps definition,” Jacob concludes. “We just need to make progress.” Your organization’s continued existence may count on it.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Chef Software covered the cost of Jason Bloomberg’s travel to ChefConf, a standard industry practice. Image credit: Chef Software.
