
Carving through the hype – take the DevOps maturity assessment
As anyone who spends time with their family over the holidays can attest, the notion of maturity is a highly subjective concept. Whether it’s sizing up the next generation’s advancement or defaulting to time-honored inter-sibling behaviors, annual get-togethers offer tangible proof of what’s new and those things that likely won’t ever change. In the domain […]

Digital Disrupters – Building a DevOps Leadership Profile
While the advancement of DevOps methodology remains fairly nascent for many organizations, an ever-expanding class of leading practitioners are evolving a wide range of related best practices. Beyond the well-worn concept of “unicorns” – the scant few organizations that stand as mythical examples of DevOps nirvana – this broader set of early adopters have begun […]

Native Integration of APM Driving DevOps Maturity
With applications performance monitoring established as one of the fundamental cornerstones of today’s DevOps methodologies, it’s easy to overlook the reality that effective instrumentation of such tools remains extremely difficult. Specifically, the biggest challenge remains creating performance metrics that address both IT and larger business initiatives. There’s no question that APM is one of the […]

Five mistakes enterprises make while implementing automation
Automation, if done right, can add a ton of value to an IT organization. Benefits include speed, quality, and improved productivity. But only a few IT organizations have been able to truly reap the benefits of it. Why is that? What is it that these successful companies do differently while others continue to struggle? Here […]

DevOps Leadership Series: Gov Does DevOps
This past week, I had the opportunity to catch up with some more industry thought leaders at the DevOpsDays DC event in our nation’s capital. This was the first major DevOps Days event to feature a large audience of government participants. It was an awesome event and is certainly going to be on my must-attend […]

DevOps Leadership Series: Gov Does DevOps (Part 2)
During my second day at DevOpsDays DC, I had the opportunity to catch up with a couple more industry thought leaders. First up, John Willis, (@botchagalupe) DevOps Days core organizer and co-author the upcoming “DevOps Cookbook”. In this episode of DevOps Leadership Series, John highlights his first introduction to DevOps and the journey it has taken […]

Follow the Unicorn: Transform your Enterprise Applications
For those of us that work on Enterprise Systems such as the mainframe, the claims that the Unicorns (1) make, can be pretty astounding. Dozens and sometimes hundreds of releases a day from big companies like Netflix (2) and Etsy (3) are hard to comprehend. But look a little closer and you can see that […]

Making DevOps Work with External Contractors
On a recent ‘virtual panel’ session, many questions came in real-time from almost a thousand attendees around the globe. I’ll try to cover the most interesting questions in this column over coming weeks, but one that came through many times is very typical of the discussions I have with my customers and others, especially those […]

A Three Step Roadmap for Enterprise DevOps
The extremes of application release velocity are converging in the enterprise. Whereas Fortune 500 enterprises may have historically taken months to years for each release cycle, they are exploring new approaches from new age Internet technology firms that release new versions of an application several times in a day. According to a recent report on […]

The ROI of Enterprise DevOps
Ever since the 1996 film Jerry Maguire, I can never think about any technology development without hearing Cuba Gooding Jr as professional footballer Rod Tidwell screaming out, “Show me the money!” So I was not surprised when the CIO of a large enterprise recently asked me the enterprise exec version of that famous line: Q. […]

The Trouble With Enterprise DevOps
The literary world and beyond has been up in arms as of late regarding the use of the word ‘literally’. It seems that many are using the word literally when they mean figuratively. For example, if you say, “I literally split my pants laughing,” it would be plausible for one to look at your pants […]

Enterprise DevOps: same medicine, different dose
I am presenting at the DevOps Summit in Santa Clara early next month. The title of my presentation is “Enterprise DevOps: Same medicine, different dose.” I will be attempting to tackle the sometimes sticky subject of whether Enterprise DevOps is a unique species or is there just DevOps for organizations big and small. My personal […]

Moving to DevOps in a traditional enterprise
Introduction One of the challenges of introducing DevOps in the setting of a traditional (i.e. siloed, waterfall etc) Enterprise is where to begin. It’s certainly something I wrestled with alongside the CTO for quite some time. It’s not possible to impart years of experience of moving a large company to a DevOps ways of […]

5 Secrets of Enterprise DevOps
There is still much debate surrounding the merits of Enterprise DevOps, some say that DevOps is great for the highly scalable startups but not feasible for the enterprise, while others say that DevOps is mandatory for a company’s survival. When enterprises evaluate the potential impact of DevOps adoption, they should consider some key points: 1. […]

DevOps adoption – Enterprises (part 2 of 2)
A large enterprise has institutionalized an incredible number of processes. Their fundamental approach to IT has been built over years if not decades of experience. Their leaders may have grown up with these methodologies and approaches. In this article I wanted to continue the thread I started in my last article about how different organizations adopt […]
