Some quick notes and callouts from this year’s 2019 DevOps Report:
Four key metrics: lead time, deployment frequency, mean time to restore (MTTR) and change fail percentage. Med, High, and Elite all have a change fail rate of 0-15%. So, expect 15% change fail as benchmark worst case to shoot for...? Demographics: 30% are devs, 26% "DevOps or SRE" - [so, lots of ICs self-evaluating]. 16% "
Posts in "tech"
The Business Bottleneck, new book
I’m working on a new book (check out the work in progress), here’s the premise:
After at least five years of struggling to transformation, IT knows how to deliver better software, how to do the process and use the new tools needed for “digital transformation.” They may not actually doall that, but they know what should be done. However, “The Business” is not involved enough nor knows what to do. This prevents achieving the full benefits of digital transformation.
Banking "disruption," or whatever - part 01
There’s near universal sentiment that traditional banks need to shift to improve and protect their businesses against financial startups, so called “FinTechs.” These startups create banks that are often 100% online, even purely as a mobile app. The release of Apple Pay highlights how these banks are different: they’re faster, more customer experience focused, and innovate new features.
The core reason FinTechs can do all of this is because they’re good at creating well designed software that feels natural to people and allows these FinTechs to optimize the banking experience and even start innovating new features.
The Strategy Bottleneck
This is a draft excerpt from a book I’m working on, tentatively titled The Business Bottleneck. If you’re interested in the footnotes, leaving a comment, and the further evolution of the book, check out the Google Doc for it. Also, the previous excerpt, “The Finance Bottleneck."
Digital transformation is a fancy term for customer innovation and operational excellence that drive financial results. John Rymer & Jeffrey Hammond, Forrester, Feb 2019. The traditional approach to corporate strategy is a poor fit for this new type of digital-driven business and software development.
🗂 Link:
Toyota is working to have 70% of new cars connected globally by 2020, with almost all of those in the U.S. and Japan. Automakers are already using the cloud to generate revenue through telematics insurance and car-sharing services. Toyota also has talked about using data to alert dealers when cars need servicing, provide information about road and traffic conditions for smart city planning, and inform retailers where their customers are commuting from to allow more targeted marketing.
"With the rise of Lean Startup, we began to focus on outcomes, yes, but we also started to celebrate failure. I want to be clear here: it is not a success if you fail and do not learn. Learning should be at the core of every product-led organization. It should be what drives us as an organization. It is just better to fail in smaller ways, earlier, and to learn what will succeed, rather than spending all the time and money failing in a publicly large way. This is why we have problem and solution exploration in product management—to de-risk failing in the market." from "Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value" by Melissa Perri
Platform as a Product talk
Here’s a recording of one of my talks. It’s on what the operations team does when running in a platform, DevOps-y, whatever style:
Developers don’t need “services” from ops, they need products: continuously innovated platforms that evolve weekly. Once ops toil is removed, ops can focus on their customers’ - development - needs. Using stories & tactics from the real-world, this talk helps launch a platform-as-a-product strategy. And:
Better than reality
The problem with binge-watching is the same problem with wanting it to be a holiday all the time. The more we consider a show serious, the more it feels permissible to drown oneself in episode after episode of it, to use it as an excuse to stay home sick from the world. It is logical that a show about dragons and swords would feel more escapist than most other things, and that viewers would want some larger permission to dive into that warm bath.
Monolithic Transformation, the webinar
I’ve got a newly recorded webinar, covering my Monolithic Transformation book:
The cliché we all recite is that technology isn't the problem, culture is. Put another way: if the hardware and software are fine and fresh, it must be the meatware that smells. Come hear several de-funking recipes from the world’s largest companies whose meat now smells proper. I answered a few attendee questions in the webinar, and answered the rest in a Twitter thread afterwards.
DellWorld 2019 coverage, selections
Dell executives have been blunt about their expectations for the impact of 5G and the edge. Dell Technologies Vice Chairman Jeff Clarke told conference attendees that 25% of all data will soon be consumed at the edge through evolving 5G applications. Dell himself was even more expansive, flatly predicting in this interview that compute of data at the edge will be bigger than the public or private cloud. Source: In gambling mecca, Dell’s founder offers evidence that big bets on multicloud, AI and edge will pay off