Category: longform
Essays, articles, and other original content.
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How to do fun and interesting executive dinners, round tables, etc. – online and in-person
Here’s what I’ve learned in doing 30 (maybe more like 40?) executive events in person and online over the past four or so years. Over my career, I’ve done these on and off, but it’s become a core part of my job since moving to EMEA to support Pivotal and now VMware Tanzu with executives.…
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Reluctance to change – Notebook
I’ve proposed an open spaces for DevOpsDays Amsterdam, 2021. The idea is: The DevOps community pushes for people to change how they think and operate. When it comes to working better, we have proven tools, techniques, and even big picture ways of thinking like CALMS. You’re more than likely eager to try these new things,…
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_Working Backwards_, recent book on how Amazon runs.
Notes: central is thinking about product features, not business. The business funds the product, the customer value – it’s the McGuffin that you careful guide to being cash flow. The question here is to find other org.s that have adopted abs adapted the practices successfully, or not. the advice at the end is pretty straightforward…
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Getting more eyeballs for your boring enterprise tech videos – analysis and LIFE HACKS from four months of long and tiny b2b videos by channel and numbers
Looking at four months of numbers, here’s my theories of how to get more attention for my enterprise tech videos: Make short ones, each with one point – 1 minute to 10 minutes. Post the videos natively to Twitter, YouTube, or whatever channel – don’t rely on people clicking on YouTube. YouTube is, in general,…
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🗂 Link: DevOps-Led Business Transformation
The reality, though, is that many European organizations are only at the beginning of the journey to achieve elite delivery performance. From IDCs point of view, the ability to transform application estates and accelerate application delivery is one of the most critical business objectives for organizations in the next five years, with European organizations forecast…
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🗂 Link: How Couples Share “Cognitive Labor” and Why it Matters – Behavioral Scientist
When I sorted through the hundreds of examples that emerged, I found four primary activities appeared over and over: anticipating a need, identifying options for filling it, deciding among the options, and monitoring the results. Chelsea, for example, noticed her toddler waking up progressively earlier each morning and envisioned her hours of sleep dwindling (anticipation).…
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Notes on the 2019 DevOps Report
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,…
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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 do all that, but they know…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Fix your boring, but immediate problems first
When GDS started in 2011, mobile apps were that day’s special on the fad menu. Ministers all wanted their own. Top officials thought they sounded like a great idea. Delighted suppliers queued up to offer their services to government. We’ll talk about apps in more detail later. For now, all you need to know is…
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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…
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Programming your organization for loonshots
Here’s an an idea for a formula for figuring out how much innovation an organization will do. I never know how good math is for this kind of thing, but it adds structure to programming an organization to be innovative, rather than career advancement seeking: In organizations, the competing forces can be described as “stake…
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5 Definitions of DevOps
I’ve tracked at least three different definitions of DevOps since the days of “agile infrastructure”: Using Puppet and Chef (and then Ansible and Chef) to replace Opsware and BladeLogic. Full stack engineers to setup EC2, load-balancers, and other Morlock shit. Full stack engineers are bad, but sort of the same thing. Also, you can’t have…
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Google Cloud stuff
A brief overview: The expansion centers around Google’s new open-source hybrid cloud package called Anthos, which was introduced at the company’s Google Next event this week. Anthos is based on – and supplants – the company’s existing Google Cloud Service beta. Anthos will let customers run applications, unmodified, on existing on-premises hardware or in the…
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“Most people in contemporary society don’t believe in Athena”
COWEN: When you translated the Odyssey — as a reader, I think of your approach as pretty clean and direct and very easy to read, but also with a lot of psychological depth, and I prefer that in the Odyssey. But when I read, say, the Hebrew Bible, I want something a little more, maybe stentorian in…
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FDA wants to regular off-label use of ML-driven devices
Obtaining FDA approval can be a difficult and long process. “The traditional paradigm of medical device regulation was not designed for adaptive AI or ML technologies, which have the potential to adapt and optimize device performance in real – time to continuously improve healthcare for patients,” the report said. “The highly iterative, autonomous, and adaptive…
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Speed, Accuracy, and Flexibility, IBM circa 1920
The purpose of a sales force is to bring a company’s value proposition—its “deal”—to customers. That value proposition results in the development of a company’s “go-to-market” strategy, how it will implement that plan. Central to that activity can be a direct sales force, people who meet face-to-face with customers, a typical approach with complex and…
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An unused executive dinner speech
I hosted an executive dinner a few weeks ago. I’d put together this opening talk, introducing the customer who was kind enough to come go through their story. I didn’t really get a chance to give it, which was probably for the best. Maybe next time Thanks for coming – we’re glad y’all took the…
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