There are numerous barriers to achieving the dream of becoming a software defined business—an organization that is deftly using software to make its processes and products better through custom written software.
One of those barriers is looking at how you organize your IT staff to best take advantage of the great “software factories” you’ll be building. As you’re establishing a good continuous delivery framework and laid down the needed foundation of a good cloud platform like Pivotal Cloud Foundry, you’ll need to also start to change the way your organization operates, measures itself, and the overall “culture.”
Indeed, cultural issues often become the first and last problem to solve—early on, you have to work to change the culture and prove out “the new way,” and, once you’ve been successful and want to apply the new way more broadly, you have to work to change the culture of an even larger set of people—everyone. Around here, these are issues we’ll always have a lot to say about.
Recently, I was asked to contribute a column to FierceDevOps on this topic—specifically on changing how the IT department is organized to take advantage of DevOps. I tend to see DevOps, for the most part, as “all the culture stuff” needed to become one of these high performing organizations. To use a word that would make the DevOps kids barf but will comfort the enterprise folks—it’s the process we’re talking about here. You could have a fun, Rorschachian conversation about how people react to that word—process.
Anyhow, check out the piece, I’m eager to hear what you think and hear about how you’ve been challenged to change your organization as you become more of a software defined business. Please, I mean it, post a comment below!
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