Posts in "tech"

The one minute pitch at DevOpsDays

As a DevOpsDays sponsor you’re often given the chance to give a one minute pitch to the entire audience. Back stage at DevOps Rex, this week, I was talking with a first timer. One minute seems like such a small amount of time: how could you say anything consequential in 60 seconds? You’re presenting in front of the full audience, anywhere between 150 to 500 people. They probably also loath vendors, or, at least are bored by them.

Two Types of Digital Transformation

There are two types of digital transformation. First, literally. You had an analog process (booking appointments at the barber shop with phone and paper, planning tanker refueling schedules with a white board), and now they’re replaced by pure software. These transformations are often about optimizing an existing business process, gaining huge cost and time efficiencies (bottom line revenue, profit) and resulting in higher customer productivity and satisfaction (top line revenue, “growth”).

Rethinking Enterprise Architecture

In the cloud, DevOps, agile, whatever is hot and new era, the role of enterprise architects is rarely addressed. There’s probably plenty useful for them to do still. I’ve been trying to figure out what those things are recently. Also, see the slides, which are usually more up-to-date. There’s also a recording from DevOpsDays Charlotte.

Rethinking Enterprise Architecture

In the cloud, DevOps, agile, whatever is hot and new era, the role of enterprise architects is rarely addressed. There’s probably plenty useful for them to do still. I’ve been trying to figure out what those things are recently. Also, see the slides, which are usually more up-to-date. There’s also a recording from DevOpsDays Charlotte.

Rule 1: Don’t go to meetings. Rule 2: See rule 1

Coffee is for coders. Whether you’re doing waterfall, DevOps, PRINCE, SAFe, PMBOK, ITIL, or whatever process and certification-scheme you like, chances are you’re not using your time wisely. I’d estimate that most of the immediate, short-term benefit organizations get from switching to cloud native is simply because they’re now actually, truly following a process which both focuses your efforts on creating customer value (useful software that helps customers out, making them keep paying or pay you more) and managing your time wisely.

Cloud Native Works in Government — the IRS, US Air Force, and contractors

“We have already slashed the time needed to implement new ideas by 70 percent while avoiding hundreds of millions of dollars in costs.” M. Wes Haga, Chief of Mission Applications and Infrastructure Programs for Air Force Research Lab Slowly but surely, the US government is improving how they do software. Working at Pivotal, I’m lucky to see some of this change and talk with the people who’ve actually done it.

Building trust with internal marketing, large and small

Most companies don’t realize the amount of work required to fully transform their approach to creating and caring for software. Scaling up the improvements learned and put into place by your initial teams relies on building trust and understanding in the overall organization. For whatever reason, most people in large organizations are resistant to change and, what with the frequent introduction of process improvement programs, skeptical of the flavor of the week of the syndrome.

So what exactly should IBM do, and have done?

Now that IBM has ended its revenue losing streak, we’re ready to stick a halo on it: There is no doubt, though, that there are signs of progress at IBM, which would not comment on its financial picture before the release of the earning report. So much attention is focused on the company’s top line because revenue is the broadest measure of the headway IBM is making in a difficult transformation toward cloud computing, data handling and A.

Big Ben spycraft

Each news programme opened with a live broadcast of Big Ben tolling the hour –the magical sound of freedom. Ingenious German physicists found a way to determine the weather conditions in London based on tiny differences in the tone of the broadcast ding-dongs. This information offered invaluable help to the Luftwaffe. When the British Secret Service discovered this, they replaced the live broadcast with a set recording of the famous clock.

Multi-Cloud Begets Confusion, Calls for Automation

One reason is confusion over how enterprises define multi-cloud: Just over half of those polled defined it as including a combination of either public or private clouds along with on-premise infrastructure. (That is also a widely accepted definition of "hybrid clouds".) Meanwhile, 23 percent of respondents said multi-cloud includes all three: public and private clouds along with their own datacenters. Source: Multi-Cloud Begets Confusion, Calls for Automation