There’s just as much pull for DevOps in government as there is in the private sector. While most of our focus around adoption is on how businesses can and are using DevOps and continuous delivery, supported by cloud, to create better software, many government agencies are in the same position and would benefit greatly from figuring out how to apply DevOps in their organizations. Just 13% of respondents in a recent MeriTalk/Accenture survey of 152 US Federal IT managers believed they could “develop and deploy new systems as fast as the mission requires.

I’m always wanting to do a talk or write a series of items on the white-collar toolchain, or surviving in big companies. Here’s one principal about presentations in corporate settings. Slides must stand on their own Much presentation wisdom of late has revolved around the actual event of a speaker talking, giving the presentation. In a corporate setting, the actual delivery of the presentation is not the primary purpose of a presentation.

Donkey teamwork What’s the point of it all? Why are we doing this? These questions pop up frequently in IT teams where the reason for doing your daily activities — like churning through tickets, whizzing up builds, or “doing the DevOps” — seems only that someone, somewhere told you to do it. If you’re in this situation — you have no idea how your activities are helping your organization make money — you should stop and find out quickly what your company’s goals and strategies are to make sure you’re not wasting time.

Think you can show DevOps ROI? Think again “What is the ROI for DevOps?” is a question that has been tossed my way frequently of late. There are numerous reasons why this is at the same time an absurd but also important question. Modeling DevOps ROI is absurd because predicting the gains and costs of a process, let alone one as new as DevOps, is difficult and dependent on all sorts of unique variables per organization.

Can DevOps declare victory yet? Not quite, but soon. Figuring out when a technology inflection point happens is always hard, if not impossible, in real-time. It’s easy to point backwards and say when ERP, agile software development, the Web, business intelligence, mobile or cloud suddenly became “normal.” I think DevOps is right at the door of that point, and as some recent Gartner predictions have proffered, we could see something like a quarter of all large enterprises using DevOps next year.

Fun with market sizing I’ve spent a lot of time over the years working with cloud market-sizings, and occasioanlly on them. They’re always a bit whackadoodle and can be difficult to pull apart. But, so long as they’re consistent year of year, they do give a good intedication of momentum and a comparision to other markets. This is what you should be using emerging technology marketsizing for: just indications of which way the wind is blowing and how strong that wind is relative to other breezes.

(I originally wrote this April 2015 for FierceDevOps, a site which has made it either impossible or impossibly tedious to find these articles. Hence, it’s now here.) Quick tip: if you’re in a room full managers and executives from non-technology companies and one of them asks, “what kind of company do you think we are?”…no matter what type of company they are, the answer is always “a technology company.” That’s the trope us in the technology industry have successfully deployed into the market in recent years.

I had lunch with Israel Gat yesterday. Lobster bisque in a sourdough bread bowl, to answer your first question. We were talking about the concept of a “software defined business” (and I was complaining about how HEB needs more of that, if only to get digital Buddy Bucks). The question came up, so will companies really do this “software defined business” stuff (that’s the phrase I like for “third platform," “digital enterprise,” horseman style jabber-jargon)?

Never mind journalism, it’s industry analysts who are being disrupted. I keep coming across a new crop of IT industry analysts who end up getting compared incorrectly to journalists. It’s little wonder as most people have little idea what an industry analyst does; it’s not like analysts, hidden behind their austere paywalls, help much there. People like Horace Dediu, Ben Thompson, and others are experimenting with ways to disrupt industry analysts.

Occasionally, my fellow analysts ask me for advice on being an analyst. Here’s an edited up version of one of my recent emails: Learn how to listen to yourself, focus You have to learn to trust your intuition about what you focus on, your own style and voice, and, most importantly for monetization, how you market yourselves. The last point is important for commercial success: in most cases, the (analyst) company you work for will do a poor job marketing you compared to how well you can market yourself.