After the success of the first two years of the U.S. DevOps Enterprise Summit, people have been asking us to host a similar conference in other locations, specifically in Europe. This summer, we’re hosting our first DevOps Enterprise Summit in London!
This conference is for technology leaders who are driving transformations in large, complex organizations. These are successful enterprises that have been around for decades (and, in some cases, for centuries!), with thousands (or tens of thousands) of employees, and billions of dollars in annual revenue. These are organizations with massive and complex daily operations, and all the resulting processes and bureaucracies that come with it. In many ways, these complex operations and bureaucracies are the very things that create the worst-case conditions for DevOps transformations!
We’ve heard amazing case studies from Barclays Capital, GE Capital, Disney, Marks & Spencer, Bank of America, Capital One, Telstra and many more, where leaders have created amazing DevOps outcomes that are more typically associated with organizations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and so forth.
For this inaugural year of DevOps Enterprise Summit London, we’ll be bringing some of our “greatest hits” from the United States, but the rest of the programming will feature DevOps transformations in organizations residing in the U.K. and continental Europe. (And we’re still holding the DevOps Enterprise Summit in San Francisco, so feel free to join us there as well!)
New World and Old World DevOps
The speakers at DevOps Enterprise are pioneering the practices of how large, complex organizations transform and deliver software. It’s my belief that these principles are universal, regardless of what continent or country the organization resides in.
One of the biggest surprises from co-authoring “The Phoenix Project” has been how many people have told me that the book describes their organization, seemingly independent of company size, industry vertical, for-profit or nonprofit or the continent they’re writing from. This validates that the problems that result when Dev and Ops can’t get along are universal.
The good news is that the DevOps solutions we deploy to fix the problems also have lots of commonalities!
It’s always inspiring to hear how these leaders have overcome the challenges they faced. I see our speakers as genuine heroes who have put themselves in personal jeopardy, often risking their careers and livelihoods, to achieve something they believe is genuinely important. They possessed the clarity and conviction that the capabilities they were creating for their organizations were needed to win in the marketplace—or maybe even just to survive.
I think one of the interesting statistics is that more than 25 percent of DevOps Enterprise speakers have been promoted in the last two years—some more than once! It’s a fantastic testament that the organization values the contributions they have made, and their risk-taking and heroism paid off.
The DevOps Movement Matures
Every year at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, I have asked all speakers to share what problems they didn’t know how to fix or the problems that they were looking for help on. What I’ve found is that the answers have evolved. From year to year, we are seeing trends on the obstacles facing the DevOps Enterprise community.
In 2014, attendees’ stated problems were about needing better strategies and tactics for creating automated tests for legacy applications, as well as the culture and leadership aspects during transformation, information security and compliance practices and identifying metrics to best improve performance with DevOps initiatives.
In 2015, the problems were focused on people and organizational design. Examples included the need for effective strategies and methods for leading change in large organizations. Speakers and attendees also wanted to know what the organization charts looked like for organizations successfully adopting DevOps. What were the respective roles and responsibilities, and how had they changed from more traditional IT organizations?
Now, as we approach DevOps Enterprise Summit 2016, we are seeking to address the next phase of challenges facing the community: What are the modern architectural and technical practices that every technology leader needs to know about? What are the technology practices for managing infrastructure, environments and automated testing? And what are the transition patterns to get there?
From the HR perspective, how do you go about reskilling the workforce and employing these new design patterns? Lastly, we are seeing compliance and security discussed more often, including: What are concrete ways for DevOps to bridge the information security and compliance gap to show auditors and regulators that effective controls exist to prevent, detect and correct problems?
The programming committee always invites a handful of speakers to return from year to year. While to some this might appear redundant, it’s actually quite fascinating to witness their journeys unfold. It’s like an episode of, “Where Are They Now,” and the speakers never cease to amaze!
Solving Problems Together
As a vendor-neutral conference, DevOps Enterprise Summit curates stories that are from the enterprise point-of-view. Most of the presentations follow a very specific “experience report” structure—speakers describe their organization and their industry, the business problem they faced, where they started their transformation, what they did and the business outcomes. It’s a simple format but very powerful because it helps other people facing the same problems learn how other people solved the problem, and it often reveals practices that can be used in other contexts.
I’m so excited to share some of the initial speakers we have slated for DOES London:
- Chris Jackson, Director of Cloud Product Engineering at Pearson
- Robin Hughes, Head of Development Services at LV=
- Justin Dean, SVP, Platform and Technical Operations at Ticketmaster
- Jeremy Waite, Chief Digital Strategist at Salesforce
- Gareth Rushgrove, Senior Software Engineer at Puppet Labs, Inc; ex-UK GDS
- Antony Collard, Deputy Director at HMRC
- Finbarr Joy, Group CTO at Lebara
- Amy Philipps, Head of Test at Songkick
- Jason Cox, Director, Systems Engineering at The Walt Disney Company
- Rosalind Radcliffe, Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect for DevOps for Enterprise System at IBM
What also amazes me about DevOps Enterprise is the concentration of talent in the technology leaders who attend—they’re all people who are passionate about technology and helping teams win, and willing to do disruptive things to get there.
Ross Clanton from Target (a large U.S. retailer) told me he valued being surrounded by people who were not only trying to solve the same problems that he was facing, but were the best in the game—and there’s a huge intrinsic value of being surrounded by those kind of people. I can definitely relate; I learn something in every one of my interactions at the conference, and I have no doubt that the practices this group is pioneering will be commonplace within a generation.
Like in any aspect of life, peers are important. As Buzz Aldrin said, “Show me your friends, and I will show you your future.”
DOES is a unique opportunity to meet some very talented and inspirational new friends who can help shape your career path. We hope you’ll join us in London.
DevOps Enterprise Summit London
June 30 & July 1, 2016
225 Edgware Road, London, UK
Early Bird £600 +VAT (ends May 2)
DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco
November 7–9, 2016
Hilton San Francisco Union Square
333 O’Farrell Street, San Francisco, CA
Early Bird $1,450 (ends May 16)
Check out videos from previous DevOps Enterprise Summits on YouTube.
