Shimel: You know, and then I’m reminded of The Who song, right? “We Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Ashley: [Laughs]

Shimel: And it seems as hard as we try to break down silos we can’t help ourselves but to create more silos, and is that just the nature of the beast here?

Ashley: You know, I think either it’s human nature or organizational dynamics or there’s certainly something to it, and I just speak on a personal level, when you get pride and ego and all those kind of things, you know what, guess what? People hoard information or they don’t report accurate information for fear of, you know, reprisal or maybe looking bad or whatever. You have to get – I think if you become, try to become a data-driven organization, that helps, because now you can’t argue with the data. Maybe you can argue with what the data’s saying, but you’ve got something to go to instead of we’re all just going to go along kind of happy and assuming it’s working well because we don’t know any better.

But the silo thing is actually a real issue. I mean there definitely were a section of the respondents who said they had seen improvements in silos, but it’s still very much a huge issue especially across, you know, vertical parts of the organization. So, you know, I don’t know that there’s any magic bullet to it, but it certainly says if we’ve been doing Agile for 15, 20 years, DevOps for 7, 8 years, what it is, it’s not solving the whole problem. It’s part of it, it’s helping, but there’s got to be more. And I tend to think it’s that layer between the technical organizations and the business organization.

There is so much fidelity of information that’s lost in translation, either the technical people are – this is just my opinion now, not in research out of the study – but there’s so much work into, well, let’s go educate them about what we know. Well, the business people don’t need to know all the details what the technical people know. Matter of fact, if we can learn some business terms and try to go sit down with the CFO and get our model straight before we go present to the chief product officer or whatever, that’s just going to help us all and I think things like that are what’s going to help move the needle on some of these communications, but that’s only part of it.

Shimel: Yeah. You know what? I also think there’s a fair amount – and maybe this is human nature of us and them, that we met the enemy and he’s us. I think, you know, when you look at the underpinning cultural kind of foundations of DevOps, it was very much about breaking down us and them.

Ashley: Yeah, that’s right.

Shimel: Because we’re all us, we’re all us and we’re all, you know, with one common goal which is to make the business better, to better serve our customers, and sometimes in that pursuit – because as soon as you have us and them, right, it goes back to Cain and Abel, I think.

Ashley: [Laughs]

Shimel: As soon as you have us and them you get those fractions, you get those – you get the silos, right? And I think that is – I don’t know if SDM – I mean certainly this report shows the silos are still there and maybe they’re different silos, but silos nonetheless, and I don’t know if that’s part of the SDM mission is to continue breaking those down or maybe it’s just a highlight where we see us and them and do that.

Ashley: I think it is from a visibility standpoint.

Shimel: Yeah.

Ashley: Culturally that’s – you know, I always hate to use the culture word because that’s sort of a catchall for we can’t do anything, right? Ultimately, I hate to be overly simplistic about it, but doesn’t it always seem the best, most successful organizations have fantastic leadership? I mean none of them that do really well have crappy leadership. I can tell you that.

Shimel: Don’t get all political on me here, Mitchell.

Ashley: Well no, I wasn’t going there.

Shimel: [Laughs]

Ashley: We could, but no, I wasn’t going there.

Shimel: All right.

Ashley: It does. Those games start at the top and they start at the bottom too, and when they start at the bottom – and I don’t mean to kind of play the whole level game, but the only – you get the environment you’re willing to accept.

Shimel: Well, you know what? Andrew Clay Shafer said that years ago; the DevOps you get is the DevOps you deserve, and it’s still true today. Anyway, Mitchell, we’re running out of time on this one, but for people who want to grab the report, it’s available on the Accelerated Strategies website.

Ashley: It is.

Shimel: Which is AccelSt.com.

Ashley: It is. Thank you very much.

Shimel: Yep. It’s also available via CloudBees. I’m not sure if on CloudBees it’s behind a reg wall or not. I don’t know that.

Ashley: I think to get the full report, yeah, they’re asking for registrations but, you know, hey, it’s – that’s sort of everybody’s – we don’t do that on the Accelerated site but that’s a pretty common thing to do. _____.

[Crosstalk]

Shimel: It doesn’t make them a bad person as we say.

Ashley: Pardon?

Shimel: I said it doesn’t make them a bad person.

Ashley: No, no. No, no. It’s, you know, what they’re going to do with that that matters and they seem to be pretty good folks. [Laughs]

Shimel: I hear you. Good stuff. Mitchell, congratulations to you and Sanjeev on this. I know we have another report maybe dropping sometime this week, early next week.

Ashley: Yeah, we do. Right.

Shimel: We can jump on another chat and talk about that one as well.

Ashley: We will. This will be in the security genre, so looking forward to that.

Shimel: Yeah. _____.

[Crosstalk]

Ashley: Our old chats. [Laughs]

Shimel: Yeah. I’m looking forward to that one.

Ashley: Alrighty.

Shimel: All right. Mitchell Ashley, founder, CEO of Accelerated Strategies Group, my guest today on DevOps Chat. Hey, Mitchell, good luck and we’ll speak to you soon.

Ashley: It’s been a pleasure, thank you.

Shimel: All right. This is Alan Shimel and you just listened to another DevOps Chat.