DOES 18 London: Day one wrap-up

Another amazing event from IT Revolution , continuing the success that CloudBees helped launch in 2014, with this Europe conference drawing over 1,000 DevOps practitioners to share best practices and success with one another. Some highlights of the talks I enjoyed today, with more to come tomorrow include:
Jeffrey Snover, Microsoft Azure Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect, made a strong point on focusing your innovation on that which differentiates in build versus buy decisions to drive Digital Transformation initiatives. He also emphasized the reality that “software is eating the world” and that EVERY company is a SOFTWARE company, so adapt or be disintermediated in the value chain.
Meanwhile, Randy Lyons of Nike leaned into the topic of Culture eating strategy for breakfast, as a key to the organizational transformation, and that innovation requires this cultural foundation in order to lead their Digital Transformation and get “closer to the customer.”
Dr. Richard I. Cook, from Ohio State University, had a fascinating lecture on findings from his research with Adaptive Capacity Labs (where he works with John Allspaw) on the necessity of dealing with failure by building an organization that can recover from failure by capturing critical knowledge and learnings from unexpected events and incidents, such as outages, degradations, and privacy breaches.
CloudBees advisor, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, CEO and Chief Scientist DORA, put forth the proposition that transformational leadership is required to achieve high performance, and of course she shared the solid research she’s done to prove it. And Jez Humble had something to say about her grammer!
Speaking of datum, one of the many topics discussed during the “hallway track” (my favorite) was people’s inability to measure the business value and risk involved in accelerating releases and deploying applications into production. Luckily (shameless product plug) CloudBees today announced Electric Flow DevOps Foresight , which was designed to help people do just that – giving teams the information that they need to unlock the Future of Continuous Delivery .
This product is a culmination of the work we do with our clients, and is validated by a lot of what we heard from many of the presentations today on enabling transformation – namely, that teams need a way to provide data backed performance metrics , instead of following some generalized maturity model, as a way to increase their success and not.
Wesley Pullen, CloudBees’s Chief Strategy Officer, shared the story of customer SOMOS (the company responsible for 800-numbers in the US). Wesley covered how SOMOS was able to tame the hybrid beast (mainframe, microservices, and more!) using CloudBees Flow’s Adaptive Release Orchestration solution to manage releases into these complex systems, while using our DevOps Insight solution to automatically measure the key metrics to confirm the results.
I’m looking forward to another inspirational and educational packed day on Tuesday. Further, on Wednesday, folks who want to “Up” your DevOps game can extend their DOES18 experience with practical workshops featuring Helen Beal from the DevOps Institute, as well as CloudBees advisors John Willis and Gary Gruver. Designed to help you apply DevOps principles in a way that fits your organization’s objectives, these workshops will teach you to build a secure pipeline, overcome your unique challenges, and prepare you for your role in leading the transformation. Come by the CloudBees booth on Tuesday if you’d like to join us! We still have a few seats left!!