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Tag: COVID-19

  • How to Get the Supply Chain Back to (Better than) Normal

    How to Get the Supply Chain Back to (Better than) Normal

    If a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, today’s supply chain is in dire straits. A recent infographic from The New York Times shows all too clearly that the international supply chain is in upheaval, due directly or indirectly to the outbreak of COVID-19. At the same time, reams of data generated along the supply chain are going to waste. The internet of things (IoT) can’t single-handedly fix the supply chain, but IoT technology combined with the cloud, AI and automation has the potential to bring the supply chain (and society) back to something resembling normal—actually, something better than normal.

    Indeed, even during “normal” times, the supply chain was stretched to the limit by the challenge of constantly reducing costs and improving margins, as well as optimizing delivery times for just-in-time (JIT) inventory. With that said, the last two years have been especially grim, with factories, stores and restaurants literally shutting down for lack of materials. Then there’s the computer chip shortage, which is doing nothing less than “dragging down the economy,” according to a White House briefing room document,

    The problem is now multifaceted, so the solution is not going to be as simple as adding a better monitoring mechanism.

    At a minimum, companies need better visibility into and transparency of their supply chains. This gives them more control over the entire manufacturing process, from sourcing raw materials to delivery of final products. Technologies like IoT, AI/ML, automation and edge computing can optimize supply chain management by providing visibility and metrics so companies can make real-time decisions.

    In manufacturing, for example, IoT can bring greater visibility into the production workflow. Data from the digital twins of machinery—analyzed in real-time and fed back to control systems—can lead to improved levels of operational and business efficiency. When manufactured goods are ready to be shipped, IoT technology can guide the logistics and transportation of goods as they move from manufacturers to end users. In addition to managing supply, companies also need to get better at predicting customer demand so it’s a self-sustaining feedback loop.

    However, companies adopting these technologies need to be aware that they will not be effective on their own. As with any digital transformation initiative, people and processes are as important as technology. To ease or even overcome today’s supply chain challenges, companies must not only agree on common data exchange formats and APIs across the supply chain but also dedicate themselves to ongoing cooperation and motivation to achieve the common goal of streamlining and hardening the supply chain. To these ends, open source will be critical to the ongoing development of common, industry-wide standards that enable companies to future-proof their solutions.

    For example, carmakers such as Tesla are simplifying their supply chain by using a higher-end processor that can perform multiple functions rather than using dozens of dedicated microcontrollers for each function, with updates pushed out over the air. Organizations need to think along similar lines when it comes to their IoT architecture. Developers have historically thought about IoT applications in a discrete way—creating custom frameworks for creating apps for low-power devices. Rather, developers should be considering IoT applications as an extension of their application portfolio—using the same languages, frameworks and tools for IoT apps that they use for cloud applications.

    Post-Pandemic Supply Chain Issues

    As we move into the next phase of the pandemic, it might be tempting to believe that all will be right with the supply chain world. However, beyond COVID-19, there are several macro trends that will affect the supply chain, including climate change, cybersecurity and the changing dynamics of global trade.

    To combat climate change, for example, companies will need to reduce their Scope 3 emissions. The EPA defines Scope 3 emissions as the result of activities from assets not owned or controlled by companies themselves but by their supply chain (or value chain). Scope 3 emissions are often the majority of a company’s greenhouse gas emissions. To reach sustainability goals, companies will need better resource management of their supply chains.

    Supply chains also are increasingly being used as a cyberattack vector. This includes both physical entities, like building operations (such as the hack of Target systems via a third-party HVAC vendor) or the software supply chain (such as the SolarWinds hack). In fact, it’s no longer a matter of if an organization gets attacked, but when.

    The war on Ukraine has magnified the intricacies of our hyperconnected global economy. The U.S. government and its allies have imposed severe sanctions on Russia, a move that will have widespread repercussions. The New York Times reported that the “response that U.S. officials have promised could roil major economies, particularly those in Europe, and even threaten the stability of the global financial system.” The same could be said for the global supply chain, if Russia responds by, for example, cutting off shipments of materials needed to build semiconductors or mounting new cyberattacks.

    Conclusion

    COVID-19, a steady and stealthy rise in cyberattacks, trade barriers, war … None of these factors caused the problems we’re seeing with both physical and technological supply chains; rather, they have exposed existing weaknesses for all the world to see—and experience. Organizations must work together to increase resiliency and security through the use of key technologies such as IoT, AI/ML and edge, as well as a commitment to open, standards-based solutions.

  • The COVID-19 Pandemic’s Lasting Impact on Tech

    The COVID-19 Pandemic’s Lasting Impact on Tech

    The COVID-19 pandemic created major opportunities for innovation and ushered in new technology solutions, but even as the danger subsides, this tech may still serve a purpose.

    Whether it be face mask detection, temperature checks, facial recognition or AI surveillance, technology crafted to combat COVID-19 is here to stay. This may present a number of benefits, but there are ethical issues that persist. 

    Throughout the pandemic, school districts sought ways to mitigate the risk of outbreaks and ensure students were complying with safety regulations. AI-empowered cameras, for example, were one of the first pieces of technology implemented, allowing schools to monitor which students weren’t wearing masks. 

    “I think it’s helpful for COVID-19 stuff, but it seems a little intrusive,” said Noa Young, a 16-year-old junior from Atlanta’s Fulton County school district. “I think it’s strange that we were not aware of that.”  

    Although students knew cameras were monitoring them, they weren’t informed about the extent of the surveillance. The cameras have the capability to scan for body temperature and can also determine if a student is wearing their mask correctly. 

    In addition to monitoring for compliance, these cameras have the ability to assist with contact tracing. They can scan students’ faces and determine who they’ve been in contact with, enabling schools to retrace the steps of someone who contracts COVID-19. This is just one example of pandemic tech’s continued development, but as adoption and use spreads to other sectors and it’s used for other purposes, security and privacy concerns begin to pile up. 

    Courtenay Brown, 31, works in an Amazon warehouse and explained the scrutiny she is under throughout her workdays. Amazon uses similar AI surveillance to keep tabs on worker productivity, notifying management if someone deviates from their assigned task for too long. Many believe this level of surveillance creates an inhumane work environment.

    “They basically can see everything you do, and it’s all to their benefit,” said Brown. “They don’t value you as a human being. It’s demeaning.” 

     The implementation of this technology is one of the factors pushing Amazon workers to take a stand through unionization efforts. 

    “There’s no way we’re going to stop or let this bring us down,” said Derrick Palmer, co-founder of the Amazon Labor Union. “It’s going to do the complete opposite. We’re going to go 10 times harder.” 

    Another byproduct of the pandemic was the shift to remote work in organizations across the country and in every industry. This shift created the need for remote access to an organization’s tools, information, data and assets, which didn’t come without inherent security risks—especially since such access often needed to happen literally overnight. 

    One way companies adjusted was through adoption of identity and access management (IAM) solutions. IAM can be used to identify, record and grant access in the cloud, an integral part of secure functionality in hybrid or remote workplaces. 

    “In the game of cybercrime cat and mouse, one could argue there is no such thing as being over-resourced. A major breach can bring down a company,” said World Wide Worx CEO Arthur Goldstuck.

    Although IAM proved to be a workable solution to the challenge of remote access management, cybersecurity threats are ever-changing and now cyberattackers have shifted focus—they may be attacking IAM solutions. 

    “Sophisticated threat actors are actively targeting identity and access management infrastructure, and credential misuse is now a primary attack vector,” Gartner described in its Top Security and Risk Management Trends 2022 report.

    To keep data safe, companies will have to be ready for an even wider range of cyberattacks, including threats to IAM. 

    These are just two examples of technological breakthroughs that were originally seen as innovative solutions but which have evolved to have their own set of problems.

  • Essential Ingredients For a Remote DevOps Team

    Essential Ingredients For a Remote DevOps Team

    Enterprise business processes are run on evolving applications, and the DevOps team needs to be as efficient as the applications they create. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on DevOps productivity—and that impact hasn’t always been positive.

    Tracking the performance of the DevOps team has become more challenging in a remote and hybrid world. Like everyone else, developers have become remote workers throughout the pandemic which means adapting to a new way of working. There has been a lot of research done on the impact of work-from-home on productivity. Of course, measuring any developer’s productivity was already a complex task. It’s not as though you can use a simple metric like the number of lines of code produced per day; it’s a lot more complicated than that.

    Working from home has made it even more challenging for developers to stay productive. There are dozens of distractions when you work from home, and research shows that it can take even the most skilled developer 15 to 20 minutes to resume work once they have been interrupted. There’s also more stress associated with balancing work and home life when working remotely. According to Catalyst, 92% of workers say they are feeling burnout from the stress of remote work.

    Software Development Thrives on Remote Work

    In many ways, the trend toward remote work has been a windfall for developers. The nature of coding has always lent itself to a hybrid or remote work environment, but unfounded concerns about securing intellectual property have always been an impediment.

    A recent Gartner survey revealed that employees are three times more likely to become high performers when given flexibility as to where, how, and when they work. Remote work also enhances flexibility and eliminates wasted time commuting. And work-from-home reduces childcare responsibilities. Catalyst found that 32% of women with child-care concerns are less likely to leave their jobs if they have work-from-home as an option.

    Remote work also eliminates geographic barriers, which is a well-understood benefit in the software industry. Being able to hire programmers working from home anywhere in the world increases the size of the talent pool and makes it easier to find developers with the right skillset.

    Of course, there are challenges for DevOps teams that embrace a remote work model. Communication is probably the biggest challenge. Zoom meetings may not be as effective as in-person meetings since it’s harder to read facial expressions and pick up non-verbal cues. It’s up to the team leader or senior manager to promote effective communications. It’s also important to have the right tools, have the right communications channels and maintain respectful interactions. Even with a remote work environment, the team dynamic can be adversely affected by the misuse of responsibility, behavioral issues and disrespectful behavior.

    Building a Remote DevOps Team

    Supporting collaboration in a hybrid work environment requires new processes, new guidelines and new tools. The best place to start is by choosing the right collaboration platforms and procedures. For example, email is a poor channel for immediate requests, but you don’t want to be answering continuous phone calls. Establish protocols for using email, chat, teleconferences and meetings. Adopting cloud communications tools also gives you more agility and scalability. 

    When choosing the right collaboration tools consider security. Working off-site gives you less control over enterprise access. Remote workers access enterprise systems using different devices and public and private networks. To reduce vulnerability to cyberattacks provide safe and secure network access with multiple security layers. Adopt virtual private networking (VPNs), remote desktop protocol (RDP) clients, and malware protection. Workers tend to be less security conscious when working remotely so take what steps you can to reduce risk.

    In addition to having the right tools, you must have the right approach. To continuously improve efficiency you need transparency, inspection and adaptation, just as you do with DevOps. Start by establishing and documenting a clear set of expectations for the remote team. Also, create a leadership hierarchy. Even though they are working from home, everyone needs a work structure. It’s up to the team leaders to create a stable work environment. Lack of clarity removes that sense of structure and safety and can undermine the team.

    Maintaining transparency is the best approach for any remote work culture. Establishing a workplace fueled by honesty and openness and where every voice is heard ensures everyone is working to achieve a common goal and keeps morale high.

    Maintaining a successful remote work environment depends on respecting the four Cs: Communication, collaboration, connectivity and culture. The four Cs are interdependent and work together to create an effective digital work environment, providing an employee experience across locations, devices, channels and situations.

    Creating a Productive Environment

    Once you have laid the foundation for remote collaboration, the next step is to monitor productivity. There are a few ways to look at DevOps team productivity. You can look at the final output of the overall effort, assessing the application that is the end product. You also can measure overall team productivity. 

    To monitor key metrics to assess team productivity, project managers must be prepared to drill down to evaluate hot spots:

    • Measure output for specific developers and see how it stacks up against the productivity of other team members. 
    • Maintain leaderboards highlighting top contributors. Using gamification creates healthy competition and can inspire greater productivity when top performance is recognized.
    • Create a conducive environment by providing the right set of tools and motivating engineers to be at their best.
    • Monitor distractions. Coding is an intensive activity and disruptions harm productivity.

    Don’t measure productivity based on coding. Developer contributions also include designing new features, functional discussions, code review, documentation, testing and bug fixes, meeting with customers and other tasks.

    Improving DevOps productivity is also a product of automation. In addition to streamlining real-time collaboration with tools such as instant messaging and Microsoft Teams, shortening development time with automated testing tools and AI-powered test frameworks eliminates manual processes and frees time for more productive tasks.

    If you are looking for a silver lining from the pandemic, consider the evolution of the remote work environment. Supporting remote DevOps developers is nothing new, but forcing employees to work from home has made the hybrid work environment more efficient. DevOps teams continue to invent better ways of working that promote flexible work hours, higher productivity and a better work-life balance.

  • Akamai: Buying Linode | Firefox: Not OK | Gone: Google Vaccine Mandate

    Akamai: Buying Linode | Firefox: Not OK | Gone: Google Vaccine Mandate

    Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

    This week: Linode gets bought by Akamai, Firefox market share is “measly,” and Google brings staff back to the office.

    1. Akamai + Aker = ‘Synergy’

    First up this week: Why is Akamai buying Linode? Whatever the reason, it’s a big payday for its solitary shareholder: Not far off a billion dollars.

    Analysis: There goes the neighborhood?

    The 100 lb gorilla of edge computing and CDNs is promising not to mess with Linode’s winning open source cloud formula: No change, steady as she goes, etcetera. But how many times have we heard that before?

    Here’s local scribbler Paige Gross: Linode’s $900M acquisition by Akamai is a ‘game changer’

    A household name in the Philly tech scene … CEO Christopher Aker founded the company in 2003, and it’s been bootstrapped ever since, growing to about 250 employees. … Aker has owned 100% of Linode since he founded it.
    …
    Aker said the deal brings the company closer to solving evolving challenges “as cloud services become all-encompassing, including compute, storage, security and delivery from core to edge. … We’ve been talking about ‘alternative cloud’ — alternative to the big guy — and now we’ve sort of validated ourself in this market.”
    …
    The Old City company maintains “well over a million accounts” but has anywhere around 150,000 active users of its platform at any particular time. Linode’s HQ, the bank building at Third and Arch Streets, remains. … For clients and Linode employees, there won’t be too much noticeable change [Linode] says.


    Why does Akamai want Linode? Jonathan Greig asked the CEO:

    Akamai CEO Tom Leighton [explained] that Linode has great customer support and is already in 11 locations, which Akamai is going to “dramatically” expand. … Leighton also noted the September 2021 acquisition of Israel-based Guardicore, a cybersecurity company that offers a micro-segmentation solution to reduce the potential attack surface of corporate networks, secure applications, and meet compliance standards.
    …
    According to Leighton, the company is expecting the cloud compute category — which includes edge applications, its net storage business, and Linode — to reach “well over half a billion dollars in 2023. … We were pioneers in edge computing and now we’re taking a big step forward in cloud computing with Linode.”


    But here’s a worried-sounding zoid.com:

    Well good for them but I hope [Akamai] don’t screw it up. Linode is a great hosting company.

    2. Firefox isn’t OK

    Last week, a journalist innocently asked, “Is Firefox OK?” And people lost their minds.

    Analysis: No, not OK—it’s a big problem for DevOps and the web.

    We need Firefox and Gecko. A Chromium monoculture is bad for the web and bad for DevOps. (Before you ask: No, the existence of WebKit doesn’t change things, thanks to Apple’s ridiculous policies). Much as I tried to say something nice about Firefox last month, its market share is, frankly, pathetic.

    Matt Burgess: Is Firefox OK?

    In the two decades since Firefox launched from the shadows of Netscape … the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market—on mobile it’s a measly half a percent. … Its fate also has larger implications for the web as a whole.
    …
    Each year Google pays Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties. … In its 2020 financial results … Mozilla listed its total revenue as $496 million. … The Google-Mozilla deal was last renewed in 2020 and is expected to expire in 2023. … Mozilla and Firefox acknowledge that for its long-term future it needs to diversify the ways it makes money.
    …
    Firefox still matters: … The browser market is dominated by Google’s Chromium codebase and its underlying browser engine, Blink. … Microsoft’s Edge Browser, Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera all use adapted versions of Chromium. Apple [has] its WebKit browser engine [but] other than that, Firefox’s Gecko browser engine is the only alternative.


    Firefox, how do we love thee? Let not_count_zero count the ways:

    I still use Firefox because:
    a) I remember Internet Explorer and the standards wars. …
    b) I don’t trust Google. …
    c) Most sites work well.
    …
    I do have questions though. … They’re currently getting around a half a billion‽ What are they doing with it? … This seems really off—really, really off.


    But heed a deeply worried Thom Holwerda:

    The decline and potential demise of Firefox is a massive problem that everybody seems to be kind of tiptoeing around—too afraid to acknowledge that if Firefox were indeed to disappear, we’d be royally screwed. We’d end up right back where we started 20 years ago, with Chrome being the new IE6.
    …
    The situation is especially dire for … Linux users, developers, and distribution makers. … Gnome Browser or KDE’s Falkon can barely be taken seriously, and … are based on Apple’s WebKit, which isn’t a great position to be in.

    3. Google’s Return to Work Plan Drops Vaccine Mandate

    Google is planning “celebrations” to welcome back employees after being fully remote. And in practice—unlike at IBM—this doesn’t mean a vaccine mandate.

    Analysis: Vocal minority wins—or do they?

    It was just three months ago that Google said it “firmly stands behind our vaccination policy.” What changed? It’s unlikely to have been due to a tiny minority of staff publishing a manifesto.

    Jennifer Elias: Google relaxes mandates

    The company will no longer require vaccination as a condition of employment … as it prepares to bring workers back to the office … at least three days a week for a “hybrid” work model. … The company [had previously] told employees that they must comply with vaccine policies or they’d face loss of pay and eventually loss of employment.
    …
    According to Google spokesperson Lora Lee Erickson … the company dropped the requirement … after removing the Jan. 18 deadline it had set for employees to either get vaccinated or get exemption approval. She declined to provide further details on the policy or the reasons for the reversal.
    …
    Google Real Estate and Workplace Services VP David Radcliffe [said Google] is preparing to begin its 30-day transition period to the hybrid work week if conditions continue to improve. He said his team is planning “celebrations” to welcome back employees. … Unvaccinated employees who are approved to enter offices will still need to follow additional protocols, including testing and wearing a mask.


    It’s too simplistic to say the anti-mandate brigade are also anti-vaxxers. For example, raxxorrax:

    I am vaccinated and HR knows this. … But if they officially demanded a certificate, I think I would have called it quits. Many people don’t have that option [but] there are consequences for such unreasonable demands.
    …
    I understand a mandate for vaccinations in certain occupations relating to health. It is something you have to personally accept if you want to work in the field.


    Although a few others are way over at the end of the bell curve. Greg Jinkerson:

    Don’t get excited, [Google is] still evil and stupid. … Now they’re backing down for some reason, [but] this is barely anything notable as far as a rollback of restrictions. [It] is not any kind of encouraging news.

    The Moral of the Story: Failure is the foundation of success—and the means by which it is achieved.


    You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.

    Image: Aleksey Kuprikov (via Unsplash; leveled and cropped)

  • IBM ‘is Ageist and Sexist’ | IBM Mainframe-aaS | IBM Vaccine Mandate

    IBM ‘is Ageist and Sexist’ | IBM Mainframe-aaS | IBM Vaccine Mandate

    Think! Welcome to Big Blue Week here at The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

    This week: IBM’s employment practices scrutinized, IBM z/OSaaS breaks cover, and IBM encourages staff back to the office.

    1. ‘Dinobabies’ and ‘Dated Maternal’ Workforce Woes

    First up this week: IBM’s defense in an employment age discrimination lawsuit looks to be shredded. Internal emails “appear to show high-level discussion about paring the ranks of older employees.”

    Analysis: Not a good look

    According to one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, unnamed “top IBM executives were explicitly plotting with one another to oust older workers … to make room for millennial employees.” On the face of it, they seemed to be doing the polar opposite of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

    Noam Scheiber: Making ‘Dinobabies’ Extinct: IBM’s Push for a Younger Work Force

    Top IBM executives were directly involved in discussions about the need to reduce the portion of older employees … sometimes disparaging them with terms of art like “dinobabies.” … Documents made public by a Federal District Court … show executives discussing plans to phase out older employees.
    …
    The newly unsealed documents, which quote from internal company emails … show top IBM executives specifically emphasizing the need to thin the ranks of older workers and hire more younger ones. [One] email refers to IBM’s “dated maternal workforce,” an apparent allusion to older women, and says: “This is what must change. They really don’t understand social or engagement.”
    …
    Adam Pratt, an IBM spokesman, [claimed,] “IBM never engaged in systemic age discrimination.” [He] said that some of the language in the emails “is not consistent with the respect IBM has for its employees” and “does not reflect company practices or policies.”


    Yikes, ageism and sexism? Experienced staff are valuable, says MrBanana:

    I did some time at IBM [and] remember being invited to a meeting with a new group, headed by a new “thinker,” who had something to present to myself and a colleague. We walked past the foosball table to the meeting room. Naturally the room had no chairs, and was covered in multi-coloured Post-it Notes. Once they had gone through their mood boards and the non-linear presentation of this new idea, I turned to the other old geezer in the room. “Didn’t we look at something like this 8 years ago?”

    “Yeah, we worked out that compute power just to run the UI for one session wouldn’t be available for a couple of decades.” The children were somewhat disappointed, and (fortunately) we were never asked back to their romper room.


    But experience can be both a blessing and a curse, learned aahortwwy:

    I experienced both sides of this in five years at a company in hypergrowth. … I learned so much at that job: … In year 1, I was determined to accomplish X and ignored the skeptical comments of some colleagues who’d been at the company longer than me. I failed and wasted some time. In years 4 and 5, new colleagues were determined to accomplish X and ignored my skeptical comments.

    2. IBM Wazi as-a-Service Confusion

    “Mainframe” is not a dirty word. It’s secure, vertically scalable, and it put the VM in VMware. Now, what IBM Wazi did for on-prem LPARs, Wazi aaS promises to extend to hosting z/OS instances.

    Analysis: Mainframe-as-a-service reinvented

    Mainframes and cloud-native DevOps need not be incompatible. To modernize legacy apps using hybrid cloud instances for dev/test—and even prod—can be a big productivity boost. But isn’t it weird that IBM spun out its mainframe-as-a-service zCloud offering only a few months ago?

    Mike Vizard: IBM Shifts Mainframe App Testing to the Cloud

    While many workloads over the years have been migrated off mainframes or simply retired, the applications that run on z/OS today are still among the most mission-critical that organizations run. … IBM this week revealed it has added the ability to set up testing environments on the IBM Cloud for z/OS mainframe applications.
    …
    IBM plans to make IBM Wazi as-a-Service (Wazi aaS) for z/OS generally available in the second half of this year, [which] will enable DevOps teams to self-provision an instance of a z/OS virtual server on a secure private space running on IBM Cloud. … At the same time, it will become easier to modernize mainframe applications by making them more accessible to other applications via a set of secure APIs … using a cloud-native set of DevOps tools that run in a Kubernetes environment.
    …
    Modernizing mainframe applications is a less complicated endeavor than migrating them. The challenge is that building, deploying, maintaining and securing all the APIs required to do so represents a significant amount of effort.


    OK, boomer, why are we talking about 1960s mainframes on devopsy.kinsta.cloud? Here’s ArchieBunker:

    Mainframes are different beasts altogether, almost alien when you compare them to PC hardware. You have binaries written for the S/360 system in the 1960s? Good news you can still run them natively without a recompile.

    You think virtualization and containers are a hot topic? IBM was running multiple OS instances inside a VM in the 1970s. … The engineering is incredible.


    But z/OSaaS? It’s déjà vu time for Beleagured Greybeard:

    “Cloud Managed Services for z” AKA “zCloud” has been around for over 10 years. … IBM offloaded it with the Kyndryl spin, so its odd that they now want to re-invent it.
    …
    If it’s a strategic platform, why didn’t they hold onto it instead of spinning it off to Kyndryl? Sounds like yet more daft leadership decisions.

    3. IBM’s Return to Work Plan has Vaccine Mandate

    IBM wants to “keep employees safe” as they return to office work after being fully remote. In practice, this means a vaccine mandate.

    Analysis: IBM Digital Health Pass is divisive to vocal minority

    Although there are exemptions on medical or religious grounds, IBM has promised to place dissenters on unpaid leave. As you might expect, the policy has a few employees up in arms.

    Cassie Werber: How Salesforce, IBM, and HSBC are approaching return to work

    When the pandemic hit, and IBM moved 95% of its workforce to fully remote, it was pleasantly surprised to discover no drop in productivity. … Still, they planned to return to offices.
    …
    The company saw this as a way to keep employees safe. … One example … is its development of the IBM Digital Health Pass as an alternative to vaccine cards or paper vaccine certificates, which they use to make sure all the staff that come into their offices are vaccinated.
    …
    Arvind Krishna, IBM’s CEO, meanwhile came up with what he called the IBM Work From Home Pledge. [It] included commitments to flexibility, kindness, sensitivity to family, setting boundaries, and acknowledged video fatigue. It concluded with a commitment to “be connected.”


    Tricky to “be connected” if you’re not allowed back in the building. Anne D’Innocenzio, Heather Hollingsworth, Tali Arbel, Mae Anderson, Ken Sweet, Matt O’Brien and Dee-Ann Durbin:

    IBM software engineer Justin Albano said his company recently notified employees that it would be revoking badge access to workers who aren’t vaccinated or haven’t proved that they are. “We’re not able to enter an IBM office at this time,” said Albano.
    …
    He said some workers have successfully sought religious exemptions but “my thought process was I shouldn’t have to explain to my company my faith” to get out of a policy that’s “immoral in its foundation.”


    What’s the alternative? With a perspective, it’s Chris Haney:

    Or, get the vaccine. Protect yourself and the people around you. You people really are detached from reality.

    The Moral of the Story: Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know.


    You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.

    Image: Marcin Wichary—cc:by; leveled and cropped (ask your parents)

  • IT Ops Trends: Cloud, Containers and COVID

    IT Ops Trends: Cloud, Containers and COVID

    Almost all companies are modernizing their IT infrastructure to remain competitive, with the focus firmly on migration to the cloud and the use of dynamic infrastructures. In a recent Trends in IT Ops 2021 survey, more than 160 IT professionals were asked how the implementation of IT strategies affected their day-to-day work. The results provided an impressive insight into the current work priorities of system administrators and IT Ops in general.

    According to the survey, most administrators believe that monitoring cloud (79%) and container (73%) environments will take on a more important, or much more important role for them in the future. Additionally, 59% of those surveyed agree that their job role has evolved over the years due to cloud computing and containerization.

    Not all IT Teams are Equal

    However, the data also shows that the changes are not affecting every IT team equally. For example, 37% of all respondents say that cloud solutions are not relevant—or less relevant to them on a day-to-day basis. This response shows that on the one hand, system administrators see cloud computing as an essential topic. However, on the other, the impact in practice is not felt to the same extent by every administrator. These responses show that not every administrator has to deal with cloud platforms on a day-to-day basis, with some being ‘siloed’ into dedicated teams that may not interact with the broader corporate cloud strategy. In addition, not every organization has fully committed to the cloud, with some finding their migration hindered by applications that are not suited to cloud migration.

    In the survey, 45% of respondents also said they believe the importance of monitoring physical infrastructure will not change in the next few years. However, 43% believe that monitoring physical systems will become more important or much more important. Conversely, a mere 1% replied that they thought physical infrastructure monitoring was less critical. 

    Taken together, these responses demonstrate that, despite the excitement around the cloud, many organizations take a hybrid approach to infrastructure. IT Ops and administrators recognize the importance of monitoring cloud systems and dynamic assets while, at the same time, the monitoring of local systems remains relevant or is even expected to gain in relevance.

    Network Management and Automation

    Cloud and containers enable faster growth of IT environments and promote digitalization. However, they also lead to a sharp increase in data traffic and more complex networking of systems. As a result of these changes, the demands on local networks are growing. This increasing demand demonstrates the importance of network management tools. 81% of respondents said that solutions in this area are relevant, or very relevant to them in their day-to-day work.

    This year, the move to a home office joined the trend towards migration to the cloud, containers, and network monitoring. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many IT departments had to adapt their infrastructure to allow employees to work from home offices. However, most administrators were relatively stress-free, with 54% saying they had no trouble adapting infrastructure to meet remote work requirements.

    Automation is also a key issue. For example, 81% of all respondents say projects that deliver deployment and configuration automation have been relevant in their organizations in the past 12 months. In addition, 92% say that automation tools are relevant, or very relevant to them on a day-to-day basis. 

    Cloud, Containers and COVID

    The Trends in IT Ops 2021 survey shows that system administrators are concerned with cloud computing and containers and several other topics. In addition, most administrators recognize the increasing importance of monitoring cloud environments and containers. That said, administrators continue to see monitoring networks and other physical infrastructure assets as critical, and some system administrators see increasing importance in monitoring this vital area. 

    In addition to the topics outlined here, respondents also provided feedback on topics such as virtualization, application performance monitoring and network management.

  • The Next Phase of Pandemic Tech Transformation

    The Next Phase of Pandemic Tech Transformation

    Last spring, we were inundated with headlines, tweets and Medium posts applauding the rapid digital transformation that businesses were going through—almost overnight—due to the pandemic and the shift to remote work. It made for an interesting feel-good narrative at the time, but it didn’t paint the full picture. Companies were thrown into the deep end; many barely staying afloat by implementing quick-fix, surface-level changes that they assumed would only be needed for a short time. Turns out, the “transformation” touted was just the tip of the iceberg.

    More than a year later, the workforce is still in flux. The reality is, some form of distributed, hybrid work is likely here to stay. Employees will continue to expect remote options and customers will want seamless, digital ways to interact with businesses, pandemic or not.

    As a result, companies must move past the temporary, band-aid solutions of last year and make those sweeping changes permanent. It’s time to move forward with true, sustainable change: Technical, experiential and, most importantly, cultural. Every company will need to become a modern technology company capable of delivering first-class digital solutions to customers, partners and employees—or risk becoming obsolete.

    Transactional Vs. Transformational Change

    The good news is just about every company understands the value of leveraging technology. A recent 2021 State of the CIO survey found that 82% of CIOs said they implemented new technologies, new IT strategies and/or new methodologies over the past year. The issue is how companies go about their technology deployments.

    People talk about digital transformation all the time, but it’s been used so much that it has become an unhelpful misnomer. More often than not, the change that companies are implementing isn’t truly transformational, but rather transactional or just slightly incremental.

    When companies have a transactional mindset, the focus is on immediate, simple and predictable changes. The purpose—or, more importantly, the outcome—is simply to continue business-as-usual. This is reminiscent of many companies last year turning to technology just to keep the lights on. A transformational mindset, on the other hand, aims to disrupt this business-as-usual and fundamentally change the paradigm in how the company operates through ways of working, use of technology and culture. It’s purposeful, aiming to solve business problems holistically and spur long-term growth.

    To be successful in today’s climate and to gain a competitive edge with customers, companies must strive to be transformation-focused.

    How to Move Toward True Transformation

    Here are three examples of how companies can shift from a transactional mindset to a transformational mindset.

    Cloud Migration vs. Modernization

    Often, when companies talk about their use of cloud, they tout that they’ve “moved to the cloud.” But all too often, it’s treated as a one-time event; a destination to reach and a box to check. At the outset of the pandemic, we saw so many organizations quickly mobilize to shore up their digital strategies and ensure they were thinking about the limitations of doing business in a virtual context, but their cloud strategies didn’t evolve to rethink these paradigms, as well. They simply accelerated their migration strategies to get out of their physical data centers and into the cloud.

    The opportunity to leverage the cloud is so much bigger than that. It can unlock greater efficiency, flexibility and growth and underpin new digital experiences and revenue opportunities—exactly the kind of strategies most companies envision. For example, health care leader InnoCare was struggling with outdated clinic management software. Instead of just moving the old bits to their cloud provider, they adopted a broader digital strategy to modernize their delivery capabilities and reimagine both the patient and clinician experience, setting new industry standards in the process. This is what we refer to as modernization and it is what leads to transformation.

    Software Engineering vs. Product Engineering

    With the rapid growth of software, it’s no surprise that software engineers are in high demand. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that software engineering job openings will grow 22% through 2029. And while software engineers will play an irreplaceable role in helping build innovative solutions, transformational-focused companies know to bring more people under the tent. By combining software engineers with other cross-functional experts who bring a different level of artistry, design and audience understanding, the end result is a more engaging, customer-centric product that evolves and grows over the entirety of its useful lifespan.

    This is exactly what fitness giant Nautilus did. They brought together a team of engineers, data scientists and machine learning experts to help bridge the gap between their equipment manufacturing prowess and their digital experience and software development goals. Collectively, they produced a total platform that integrated hardware, software and data to create a dynamic workout regimen that impressed users and fended off competitors.

    Moving Beyond Proof-of-Concept to Long-Term ROI

    A proof-of-concept (POC) is a rite of passage in the tech world. It’s how a company or team demonstrates that their idea is feasible and can work in a real-world application. But POCs alone are insufficient; they are transaction-minded and don’t focus on achieving lasting business outcomes or generating deeper ROI. Rather, they mostly focus on technical feasibility. The key to upleveling toward transformation is by focusing on the processes, not just the end product. When testing features in a real-world setting, make sure that you’re proactively measuring not just that they work—but that they contribute to business imperatives, meet customer expectations and strategic outcomes. And if they don’t, go back to the drawing board and optimize with those higher-level goals in mind.

    Culture is Key

    As you can see, the difference between a transactional and transformational mindset is more about culture than technology. A culture of innovation and modern ways of working leads to transformation that fundamentally shifts the way technology is conceptualized and created. It isn’t solely about gaining efficiencies or cutting costs—instead, the focus is on making the lives of customers, employees and everyday users better. Transformation-focused companies believe in the promise of technology advancements, but they believe that it also can make operations smoother, customer relationships more meaningful and increase revenue when implemented with the right combination of skills, disciplines and organizational buy-in over time. It’s those companies who will thrive in this new era.

  • EP 14: What Have We Learned?

    EP 14: What Have We Learned?

    The past year-plus has brought disruption and opportunity to businesses and software teams all over the world. Change is inevitable, but 2020 was a year of massive change: businesses pivoted, supply chains were disrupted, customer expectations shifted to contactless services, digital transformation projects accelerated, new digital experiences were created, the move to the cloud jumped into high gear and our ability to create and deliver software was elevated to an essential capability for business.

    It’s time to pause and ask ourselves, what did we learn from all of this disruption and change? What lessons can we carry forward? How do those experiences inform how we prepare for 2021 and beyond?

    Cornelia Davis from Weaveworks, Kurt Chase from Tricentis and Sanjeev Sharma from Truist join hosts Alan Shimel and Mitch Ashley in this episode of DevOps Unbound to discuss lessons learned, how to overcome the obstacles we’ve faced over the past year and how to improve business processes and make better decisions. The video is below, followed by a transcript of the conversation.

    DevOps Unbound is sponsored by Tricentis, the world wide leader in automated testing. DevOps Unbound airs biweekly on TechStrong TV, with all episodes available on Digital Anarchist. There is also a live monthly roundtable open to audience participation.

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, this is Alan Shimel, and you’re watching DevOps Unbound. For those of you watching for the first time, DevOps Unbound is a biweekly video series where we tackle interesting topics related to DevOps. Once every four to six weeks, we do a live roundtable with a live audience questions and live audience participation, and we invite you to our next one. You can find that scheduling at DevOpsUnbound.com.

    Today, though, is a session just with our panel, and what a panel it is. Let me introduce you to them. First off, let me introduce our friend, Sanjeev Sharma of Truist. Sanjeev, maybe you wanna introduce yourself to the audience.

    Sanjeev Sharma: Sure. Thanks, Alan. First of all, thanks. Great to see you all. Hopefully, we will be able to meet in person soon, but thanks for having me on. I am the Head of Automation and Platform Engineering at Truist Bank. Truist, for those of you who might not know, is the new bank that was created last year by the merger of BB&T and SunTrust. I have various hats I wear at Truist, but my background is mostly in the DevOps and cloudware adoption space.

    Shimel: Excellent. Thank you, Sanjeev, and welcome. Sanjeev, I should mention, is also the author of The DevOps Adoption Playbook.

    Next, we’re really, really pleased and honored to have Cornelia Davis with us. Cornelia is, of course, a pretty well-known thought leader and leader at the DevOps space, but is also at Weaveworks. Cornelia, welcome. If you wanna give a little background?

    Cornelia Davis: Sure, yeah. Thank you so much, Alan. It’s so great to be on again. Yeah, I am the CTO at Weaveworks, and you might know Weaveworks as the company that coined the term GitOps, that has been kind of driving that movement. And GitOps is just an element of a broader category, which is really developer platforms, which is what we’re talking about many, many times when we talk about DevOps.

    And so, prior to Weaveworks, I’ve been here for about a year and a half, I was at Pivotal, where I worked on Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes based developer platforms, you know, platform teams for enterprises for quite some time. And I’m also the author of a book called Cloud Native Patterns, which is a book aimed at architects and software developers, helping them learn how to build software for this highly changing, highly distributed—constantly changing, highly distributed environment that is the cloud.

    Shimel: Absolutely, thank you. It’s a pleasure to have you here. Last but not least on our panel today is our friend Kurt Chase with Tricentis. I should mention Tricentis is a sponsor of DevOps Unbound, and thank you, Tricentis, for sponsoring. But Kurt, why don’t you give them your background?

    Chase: Yeah, thanks, Alan. Great to be here today with Cornelia and Sanjeev. Nice to meet both of you. I’m currently running Release Management and Engineering Services at Tricentis, which, Engineering Services is a group that provides cross cutting services primarily for internal engineering, but effectively for the whole corporation as well.

    Prior to Tricentis, I spent years at Splunk, again, supporting the engineering function, all the CI/CD builds and releases and things like that. And then prior to that, I spent almost two decades at Autodesk, producing the AutoCAD, multiple releases of the AutoCAD software product.

    So, again, it’s great to be here today with all of you. Excited to talk about some of the things we’ve learned over the last year, year and a half—and what a year it’s been, holy cow. [Laughter]

    Shimel: Yes, it has. Then let me finally introduce my co-host here at DevOps Unbound, my good friend and partner, Mitchel Ashley. Mitch, why don’t you give a little background?

    Mitch Ashley: Thanks, Alan, and of course, I’m excited to have our panel—thank you for joining us, all of you, today.

    I’m Mitch Ashley, CEO of Accelerated Strategies, an analyst firm that focuses on DevOps and cloud native, cyber security, digital transformation. I also work with Alan as part of MediaOps, the folks that put on this event, with the CTO of that organization. So, it’s a lot of DevOps practicing and observing what others are doing, so I’m excited to hear what Sanjeev and Cornelia and Kurt have to say, too.

    Shimel: Alright. Thank you, Mitchell. And as I mentioned, DevOps Unbound is sponsored by Tricentis, so—many thanks to them.

    Today’s episode, folks, as I mentioned off camera, I don’t wanna jinx anyone or anything, but at least here in the U.S., we seem to, at least we hope that we’re seeing this whole COVID life sort of starting to recede in our rearview mirror. We are returning to normal or a new normal, some may say recklessly too quickly, or some may say not quickly enough, but certainly, the return to normal is on, and accelerating.

    But, you know, there have been many, many lessons, many, many experiences, some painful—extremely painful—from a business and a humanity point of view over this last 14, 15 months or whatever it’s been. There’s also been a tremendous amount of success, a tremendous amount of acceleration, a tremendous amount of, “Jeez, this really—this worked. We didn’t know if it would work, but it worked,” probably the Internet being the first thing, right? Where would we be with this without an Internet?

    But can we—let’s take a moment, and let’s, as I say, hope and pray that this is in our rearview mirror or starting to move to the rearview mirror. What are the lessons? What can we learn, what will we take forward from this? And, you know, I don’t wanna boil the ocean, because I think there’s a lot, but if I asked each of you to give me three things that you really, you think—not just you personally or your organization, but the tech industry has learned, the business world has learned, perhaps society in general, humanity has learned, what would you say some of those things are?

    I don’t wanna put anyone on the spot, but Kurt, you always have something to say. I introduced you last, we’ll start with you.

    Chase: Sure. I’ll jump right in, and one thing that’s amazing to me, not so much from the technology or engineering or R&D side, let’s talk about business, here—the other aspects of the business that were able to adapt to remote work, that, to me, was pretty incredible.

    When COVID really took hold, I wasn’t too worried about software engineers and folks producing software working from home, doing their coding, testing, and all that. The other functions—finance, legal, things that are required to ship your products—seeing those go remote at the pace they did, that was pretty incredible. I think they definitely took advantage of some of the learnings from their individual engineering teams. But to me, that’s one thing that sticks out right away is the speed at which businesses adapted to working remotely and the success they achieved across the functions in the business. That was incredible to me.

    Shimel: Agreed. I mean, the speed of adoption was something. Cornelia, did you wanna say something?

    Davis: Yeah, sorry, I was muted there. I did wanna chime in, because I agree, and one of the ones that really knocked my socks off was how quickly call centers went remote.

    Chase: Yeah. [Laughter]

    Davis: Because that isn’t something I would’ve expected. I would’ve expected them to still be kind of really tied into their telephony services and, you know, the phones that are on their desks.

    But I spoke with many, many people, you know, various customer service people from the banks and from, you know, the Amazon.com—well, there’s not that much of a call in center there, but from all of these different organizations where, when you chatted with these folks, they were like, “Yep.” Within a week, they were able to move everything, move everybody remote in these traditionally really physical call center based systems. Which means that there had to be some preparation. I don’t know if it was intentional, but there had to be something that allowed them to flip that switch so quickly. Is it just forwarding phones? Is it just VPNs? I don’t know.

    Shimel: No, no, it was—so, I have some info on that, if I can. I interviewed a fellow down here in Florida, I think he was out of Tampa, and he operated multiple call centers, like in Costa Rica, which is actually a call center capital, believe it or not, that’s a big business down there. It turned out that the software they used, right, people in call centers, they don’t just—Kurt just doesn’t call someone randomly. Everyone gets assigned their calls or their inbound when a call comes in and gets assigned.

    The software they used within the call center itself worked just as well, the person didn’t have to be in the desk next to you, he could’ve been anywhere, it turns out, or she could’ve been anywhere. And so, it worked just as well in a remote thing. So, they still used the software they were using that tracked how many calls they did, who they spoke to, the notes, putting it into the central database. Yes, they had to be cloud-based, right, because there was no one in the call center to kinda run that infrastructure. But the software, it turned out, worked remotely as well as it worked on everyone’s desk in the call center. It was an amazing thing.

    And so, what they found—again, and this is gonna be, I think, something that’s gonna be a recurring theme—who needs the physical call center? They don’t need that infrastructure anymore. They could have people working at home just as well.

    And so, the more advanced ones—and you’ve probably seen this yourselves—you call someone, they may be very well at home, but they’re giving you the same mediocre service that you get when you call the call center itself, right? [Laughter] But yeah, no—

    Chase: And that’s the point. I think with a business, it’s applicable across functions there, it’s amazing. And business learned that they can still be extremely successful, even if everyone’s remote. And having that pool of remote talent—that changes everything. [Cross talk]

    Sharma: I think a couple of things to be noted there, right? First of all—sorry, Cornelia, I think I spoke over you. You know, one is, the pendulum also needs to swing back from that extreme.

    Chase: That’s the challenge, yeah. [Laughter]

    Sharma: Right? Because, while we have people who are able to work from home because the technology is there, from an equity perspective, one has to look at people who cannot work from home who are being forced to.

    Chase: Yeah.

    Sharma: And we experienced that when we opened up our offices. We are just beginning to open up our offices. June 1st was the first day folks would come back. And I was surprised to see some people had jumped at the opportunity and said, “I want to go back.”

    Chase: Yeah.

    Sharma: Then when you look under the hood and you talk to them, you realize, you know, they’ve been struggling. They’ve been operating out of a tiny closet, right, because they don’t have the space or because they have toddlers or they’ve been struggling with Internet issues, and it is worse overseas than it is here in the U.S.

    So, I think the pendulum needs to swing back to a more normal position, but hopefully, it won’t swing all the way back to where they say everybody has to be on site, on premises, right? So, I think that is definitely, some balance has to happen to recognize—some people do need a workplace, where they can work comfortably.

    Chase: You’re absolutely right.

    Davis: Yeah.

    Chase: I know a story of one individual who was in a one bedroom apartment in San Francisco and after three weeks, he couldn’t handle it. It’s like—I don’t have no space.

    Davis: Yeah.

    Shimel: It happens. Cornelia?

    Davis: And, you know, honestly, I have space, and I have a wonderful office and I’m super comfortable, and I’m also desperate to get back into the office.

    Chase: Yeah.

    Davis: Because—and I love, Sanjeev, that you called out the equity thing, because that’s something that is so painfully obvious in the whole pandemic is that this has only broadened the inequities that we have across society, and we need to absolutely focus on that.

    But then the other lesson, you know, with me, I’m extremely privileged, I live this super comfortable, I never really had to worry about catching COVID, I could just choose to stay home. But humans need humans and, you know, we’re all coming to you on your two-dimensional screen. I am super fortunate that last week, I had the opportunity to have my first face to face with a couple of colleagues in over a year, and it was rejuvenating. I’ve been saying, it’s a 3D work world again instead of a 2D work world.

    Shimel: Yeah.

    Davis: And so, I mean, humans need humans. But you’re right, Sanjeev, I think that the even bigger thing is that we really, really need to look at the inequities. And in the beginning, in the early parts of the pandemic, without getting too political here, we had all of this narrative around these people who we considered essential workers who were kind of the forgotten, like, taken for granted folks, and they were put on a pedestal, and that, unfortunately, didn’t last that long.

    Chase: Yep.

    Sharma: Yeah.

    Davis: And so, we need to bring that back.

    Shimel: And they weren’t paid like they were that essential, either, but that’s [Cross talk]—yeah, it was a pretty low pedestal. But let me, you know what, you bring two things—I’m sorry, Mitch, I just wanna make two quick points.

    Number one, when we talk about the inequality, let’s be really clear. This has affected women and mothers especially, more than men, right?

    Ashley: Mm-hmm.

    Davis: Absolutely.

    Shimel: Mothers have had—because not only have they had to work from home, but they’ve had to take care of the kids who are not in school. And it’s very hard being a teacher, a home care provider, and doing your work at work. And so, how many women have had to work out of the workforce because they had to take care of their kids and their kids are home and they didn’t have an option, there was no child care for them. So, I think—

    Ashley: And the challenges of re-entering the workforce.

    Shimel: Right, and now they’ve gotta re-enter after, you know, months off, and that’s never easy. People wanna know, “Well, why the gap in your résumé?” Well, there’s a gap in my résumé because I have this beautiful child that I’m raising, you know, and how dare you? That’s number one.

    Number two, it is a case of the rich get richer, right? Companies that, not only individuals as you say, Cornelia, but companies that were able to leverage this. Man, they accelerated, but they accelerated at the expense of their competitors who couldn’t, right? Think about all the open retail shops in the malls near you and the strips, right?

    Davis: And this is a place where I’d love to pull DevOps into the conversation, because we are, of course, as a part of DevOps Unbound. One of the things that I thought was impressive—and I’ve worked with some of these companies. In, you know, my previous life at Pivotal, I worked with The Home Depot, for example. When you had The Home Depot and you had these other organizations that, in a matter of weeks, updated their software so that you could do things like curbside pickup? That right there is DevOps in action.

    Shimel: Yep.

    Davis: It is the ability to release software, get feedback, release software, and there was no six-week testing cycle that we used to do, or eight-week testing cycle.

    Shimel: Mm-hmm.

    Davis: It was like, “You know what? We are gonna be testing in production, because we didn’t have time to test this for six weeks.” So, it brings in all of these tools that Kurt, I’m sure, you have day to day experience with, which is these things that allow us to put safety nets in place to be able to release all the time. I mean, that is something where the people who were along their DevOps journey already had a leg up on those that didn’t.

    Ashley: You know, Cornelia, I had that exact experience where I couldn’t get a computer, you couldn’t get one shipped to you, they just weren’t there, so I had to build a computer for some video work, and did it solely from parts from Best Buy, by curbside pickup, two Best Buys in town.

    Davis: Yeah.

    Ashley: So, it literally was, like, a week later, all of a sudden, I could do this, and I was pretty shocked by it.

    One of the things I wanna say, though, about what we’re discussing is, the people dimension of it is extremely important. I think there’s a whole other set of lessons for the business. I think we’ve pressed reset on a lot of assumptions about how businesses have to operate, that you have to be in an office. And essentially, we’ve kinda globalized the business by just taking the location out of it now. And yes, there are privileged and underserved and people who aren’t privileged. And those inequities probably are gonna get bigger, not smaller, because I don’t think we’re gonna all slap back into the office immediately.

    But what the businesses learned is that lesson you just talked about with Home Depot and you with Best Buy is—you know what? We can decide we’re gonna pick Team or Slack in two days instead of two years. We can get a software release out in a few days if we have to. Talk about constraint based management—you know, we now have this constraint and everything else comes off.

    So, I think what it’s done overall, though, is for DevOps and for all of us is, it’s moved software from maybe second or third to number one. Our ability to get software out the door that’s effective, meets what we need it to do, but that is a strategic advantage, maybe even a survival advantage of what we’ve seen happen in this past year.

    Chase: Yeah. I think some of it is, you know, businesses like that were forced to do it or die, basically, you know? And I 100 percent agree with Cornelia that I think they look to DevOps and some of the practices that they’re all used to. You know, the collaboration we need across functions to move forward and all those things are key, some of the foundations of automation, you know? That has been key in the DevOps space, and I think they learned, they need to take advantage of automation to do these things as well.

    So, yeah, it’s been fascinating to see that. And that was a point I brought up to see how businesses transformed and our world changed. And I think it’s opened up endless opportunities for us moving forward. And to Sanjeev’s point, I hope when that pendulum swings back, corporations take a look, that this is no longer a corporate decision where people work, it has to be more joint. It has to be more personal, because every situation’s different, and if you wanna maximize all your programs in HR, diversity and all those things, you have to take that into account. I don’t think you can do a one size fits all any longer.

    I still wonder if all those big office buildings, I worked in downtown San Francisco for many, many years—are we gonna fill those up again, ever? I really wonder now if that’ll ever happen. I could see it not happening, quite honestly.

    Ashley: I’m curious, Sanjeev, you’ve been in the middle of this bringing two companies together with this new bank in the middle of all of this. What in God’s name was that like? [Laughter] What are the additional challenges you’ve had for that, or maybe what opportunities has it created?

    Sharma: Yeah, so, I think it—you know, I joined in the middle of the merger, right, so we were in the middle of it when I joined. So, what I can tell you in the 10 months I’ve been there, we have shifted a lot of the priorities because of the pandemic, right? A lot of things which we would have done later on, we did first. We were able to do things.

    But the flexibility has definitely opened up. I can tell you, between the time I joined and between now, the ability to hire people who are not local to one of our offices has gone through the roof. It used to be an exception, now it’s the norm, right? The last three people I hired, two are in the West Coast and one is in Minneapolis, right, so Midwest. It doesn’t matter anymore, right? The same way there are—the operation has opened up a lot.

    And when I look at it broadly, outside of who I’m working with, when I’m talking to other companies where I have friends or colleagues, they are seeing more offshoring happen, right? Because they’re going, “Why do I need to hire somebody in L.A. if they’re never going to see the person ever anyway, does it matter whether he’s in Bangor or Bangalore, right? Let’s put the person, let’s hire the right person at the right place.” So, I think a lot of that has opened up. It has, of course, shifted some of the salaries, also.

    So, you know, a lot of things are going on, interesting dynamics are happening, and we’ll see how that all pans out. But from a perspective of, you know, doing the transformation, it is hard when you can’t have people in the same room on a white board and things which could have just drawn on a white board and knocked out in a 1 hour or 90 minute working session, now it’s like 15, you know, Zoom views, WebEx or Teams calls, which could have been, and it’s like, “Where is that white board we made up? Was it on Miro or was it on Mural or was it on this or was it on that? You know, and who can edit it, who can’t edit it?” All those—you know, dang it, if we just had a white board and all of us in the same room, we could have knocked this out in half a day.

    So, it is difficult to do certain things remotely. I think there has to be a balance, which needs to happen. And yeah, during a merger just made it more complex, because we are going through change every day, right? People’s networks are changing, people’s—how we are doing things are changing, we are updating stuff. It’s been a very interesting few months and we’re not done yet. You know, the merger isn’t over. We’ve still got a long way to go. So, it’ll be more fun going forward, I think.

    Shimel: I think it brings up the issue, though, of how much of this sticks, right? Because, I mean, look what Sanjeev just described. We’ve all had similar experiences, I’m sure, hiring people from all over the world—what difference does it make? They don’t have to come in the office.

    Does that stick? Because if it sticks, there are profound implications for society in general. Why live in San Francisco unless you love the view of the Bay. It’s a beautiful bay, right, the bridge is nice, but pay $4,000.00 for a closet-sized one bedroom apartment? Maybe not. I mean, on the other hand, I live in South Florida. Housing market is insane because of people moving here from New York and California and spending a fortune—Colorado, right?

    So, does this—that’s one example. Does the ability to work from anywhere, it makes no difference, is that something that sticks around, or do we, as Sanjeev said in the beginning, see a pendulum start to swing back? What do you think?

    Chase: Well, for me, like I said, I think elements of it have to exist and remain. I think there needs to be a balance, as Sanjeev said. I no longer think it’ll entirely be a corporate decision where employees are located. I think for some roles and groups in organizations, there needs to be a deeper conversation on where is the best talent, what’s the best way to use them? You know, having people sit—just the commute. The one thing I don’t miss is the commute. Oh, my God, you know, those three hours a day commuting, you know, that, to me, we have to somehow retain that benefit, you know, from working remotely somehow. I’m not sure how.

    But that’s a very good question, Alan, I don’t know. It’s like, will those office buildings ever be full again? I don’t know. I’m not sure.

    Sharma: On that point, I’ve been remote since 2013. In 2013, I was at IBM. I moved to a global role, and since then, I haven’t had an office. I’ve worked out of this room since then. But I used to travel 150 to 175,000 miles a year.

    Chase: Got it, yeah.

    Sharma: Right? So, for me, the office was a place to go collaborate, whether it was my office or my company, IBM—

    Shimel: And for all of us.

    Sharma: – right, or a client’s office, it was not a place to go and have a desk, right? My desk is here, right, my books are here—you know what I mean, right?

    Chase: Yeah.

    Sharma: I think we should, I would like to see us go to that model where offices become more of a collaboration space rather than a place you have to show up and work alone in a cubicle. What’s the point of that?

    Ashley: I agree.

    Sharma: Unless somebody needs it, right? That’s different if they don’t have space at home and the need a cubicle to work in—fine, put them in a WeWork next to where they live, right, close to where they live rather than have them commute to the other, you know, 45 minutes one way.

    I think that’s the model we should head towards.

    Chase: I agree.

    Sharma: And, you know, the tools to enable that are there, we’ve proved it. We’ve proved, during the lock down, during the pandemic that the tools are there, but I hope it goes that way. I hope it doesn’t go back to, “You have to show up in this cubicle” even if you are, you know, like the guy from Office Space protecting the stapler and never talking to anybody.

    Ashley: The butts in seats model, right? [Laughter]

    Chase: We’ve seen some large organizations [Cross talk] make those calls already and say you can be remote forever now, you know, things like that. So, I think that’ll become a bit more selective, but I still hope, when that pendulum does swing back, that the employee has a say, you know, and his voice is a little bit taken more seriously.

    Shimel: Or her voice.

    Davis: Or hers.

    Chase: Or hers—or hers, [Cross talk].

    Davis: Exactly, that’s where I’d like to chime—I’d like to chime in there, because Alan teed this up earlier and then, because you had two things, Alan, we followed thread number two.

    I wanna come back to thread number one, which is that this has affected women in the workforce, and it’s not just us technologists, but it’s a broad spectrum, and it’s probably even more so in other working arrangements. And so, I love what you’re saying there, Kurt, about it being a partnership between the corporation and the employee and determining what’s best for them. And then Sanjeev, you, I think, just teed up—is that the survival answer for WeWork is that part of that negotiation between the corporation and the employee, she or he, includes having the ability to move into a workplace that is close to your office but allows you that space that you need, for example, not to be on call for child care.

    Of course, the other thing I can’t help but say—and I’m very fortunate, I have one son, he’s 26, I’m not tying shoes or going to PTSA meetings anymore—

    Shimel: I hope not. [Laughter]

    Davis: – so, I wasn’t affected in that way. Yeah, [Laughter] I wasn’t affected in that way in the last year, but I was a working mother and I worked from home that whole time. And I just wanna remind everyone, men and women, that you’re right, women take on that burden, but it doesn’t have to be that way, fathers.

    Shimel: Amen.

    Chase: Mm-hmm.

    Cornelia Davis: So, please pitch in even more than you think, just because it’s been kind of the standard operating procedure. If nothing else, I hope the last year has maybe, in some cases, resulted in a, hey, a need-based way of rebalancing responsibilities. That is something that every single individual, male or female, can participate in kind of these societal expectations and challenging those.

    Ashley: I think something happens—

    Shimel: You know what? Oh, go ahead, Mitch, I’m sorry.

    Mitch Ashley: When things open up, when opportunity happens and things make that shift, it’s different when there’s opportunity there, but when things have shifted and made a shift, they don’t snap back to the old way automatically. It transforms sort of the landscape going forward, and there’s so many things about this—and you mentioned women in the workplace, we also have people of color—and we think about the emphasis of diversity that’s happened over the last year and a half, which is fantastic. And we see so much more bringing to the forefront of women in leadership positions, people of color being involved in security more, whatever it might be. You know, I don’t think that that changes.

    So, hopefully, those people who now are getting to participate in a bigger, broader way or have more opportunity to do that, (a) I don’t think this is gonna go away, (b) that’s gonna change things for us, right? You know, maybe, Cornelia—[Laughter] here, I’m speaking about what I don’t know about—but maybe more women in leadership positions make some of those, it’s assumed that the woman at home does the child care or whatever is part of our societal transformation, that it isn’t necessarily an assumption. Hopefully we can get past that and remove that barrier for people so there is more opportunity.

    Shimel: So, Mitch, on that front, though, here’s the deal. Number one, I think the move to diversity is not necessarily COVID related, I think it’s just an idea that its time had come, it has been a long time coming, number one.

    Ashley: I totally agree.

    Shimel: Number two, I think one of the positive things that happened is, it wasn’t just the woman stuck at home taking care of the kid. She was stuck at home taking care of the kid while the husband was trying to carve out a desk space in his bedroom somewhere to try to do a meeting or something, right?

    But what often happened, at least among my friends—look, my kids, also, Cornelia, they went away to college even though their college was online, just to get out of the house from their mother and father who wouldn’t let them breathe. But most—like, people I know whose kids were younger, the mother and father were home. They had to split up, delegate duties. You did the wash, I cook the meals, you clean the table, I took the kids here, you took the kids there or entertained them now because you had work to do, I had work to do.

    In a best case scenario, it became very much a shared responsibility. Of course, not every scenario or every instance has that best case outcome. There’s a lot of people [Cross talk], you know?

    Ashley: I think it’s been a journey to share. It may not be quite as, like, “Okay,” [Cross talk].

    Davis: Yeah, yeah.

    Shimel: Well, that goes, this is—

    Davis: I mean, you’ve painted a fairly ideal picture.

    Shimel: That is an ideal picture, you’re right.

    Davis: Yeah. You know, this conversation is making me wonder, and I don’t have these stats, but I wonder if anybody else has heard the stats—you’re right, absolutely, that this shift towards more underrepresented folks in leadership positions, women, people of color, and so on, that absolutely started before COVID.

    I wonder how COVID has affected that. Have the numbers accelerated, have they decelerated? I think—I suspect the latter, and I’m pretty much an optimist, but I’m also a bit of a realist, and I wonder whether the last year has slowed down progress when it comes to diversity at the leadership level. I don’t know. It’s just a gut feeling. I’d love to see some metrics on that.

    Sharma: I can tell you, Cornelia, in IT roles, it has always been very difficult to hire people from minorities, right, underrepresented minorities.

    Davis: Yeah, of course.

    Sharma: It always has been. I personally believe it has gotten worse, because if you look at especially leadership roles, senior roles—we’re not talking fresh college grads—most of those roles, no matter what anybody says, happen through referrals and connections, through your network.

    Davis: That’s right.

    Sharma: And that network stalled. That network stalled during the pandemic, right?

    Shimel: Yeah, networking, yeah.

    Sharma: Right? It is as big as it was then or grew slightly, right, that networking opportunities were gone.

    Davis: Yep.

    Sharma: No Meetups, no conferences, no lunches, no power breakfasts, no women in technology meet ups—nothing. The network stalled—you only knew the people you knew, right?

    Davis: Yep.

    Sharma: And I think that hurt, bad. I find when I’m trying to hire, when my peers are trying to hire, we are struggling more to have—see, you can’t hire when you don’t receive the résumés. When there are no résumés coming in, how do you hire, right? And I’m struggling, and if anybody has, if either one of you could—any one of you has any suggestions on how to fix that, I’m all in. Please, I’m all ears.

    Davis: I think—

    Chase: Yeah, I was gonna say, you pointed out an anti-pattern to what I was gonna say, Sanjeev. I was gonna say, at least with COVID and all the remote work, our talent pool has opened up worldwide, but you’re saying that hasn’t helped in that regard.

    It has for me with some of the roles I’m hiring. Now granted, they’re not Director, Senior Director, VP level roles yet. But for the other roles, having the world as my talent, you know, the talent pool versus the United States, that makes it [Cross talk].

    Sharma: Well, I look at it a bit differently. I look at it a bit differently, Kurt. You know, hiring—how do I, I wanna make sure I say this properly. Hiring an Indian in India is not hiring a minority.

    Chase: Yeah, true. Yeah, true.

    Sharma: Hiring an Egyptian in Egypt is not hiring a minority. Hiring a Turkish person in Turkey is not a minority, right?

    Shimel: Right.

    Sharma: They have to be a minority in where you’re hiring them, that’s the only way it works.

    Shimel: Agreed.

    Davis: Yeah, I think, [Cross talk] I wanted to comment on your remarks, Sanjeev. I think that you’re spot on. Because there were opportunities, and some of the techniques that we have used in corporations to source diversity candidates or underrepresented candidates, those things went away. So, being able to go to a historically black university or go have your recruiter show up at Women Who Code meet ups, those went away, and those aren’t the same.

    Sure, Women Who Code still had meet ups line, but it’s not the same as walking around during the social hour and saying—or, I’ve been at many meet ups where, before they start the program, they say, “Okay, who’s hiring?” And everybody stands up and then, “Who’s looking?” Everybody stands up. “Alright, you folks, talk.” That was a very organic thing that was not just so easy to say, “How do you do that in an online setting?”

    You’re right, it’s—I hadn’t even thought of that, but that whole network is the same now as it was a year ago is remarkable, especially when it comes to leadership.

    Sharma: Exactly. That’s why hiring from a historically black university, we can still do that today, because the recruiters still know the counselors there, they still know the placement office or whoever does—you know, those networks are still there. It’s just that the network hasn’t grown. The higher you go, right, the air gets, you know, rarer, right, and those jobs are fewer and you are not screening 100 résumés to do that. You’re relying on the network more than often, no matter what anybody else says, right?

    And that network stalled. I mean, who have we met at a conference who we didn’t know before? Now, when I go to a meet up and I see somebody I know—

    Davis: Yeah, but I think what you’re pointing out—

    Sanjeev Sharma: – I am IM-ing that person, not some stranger who I’ve never met, right? Unless there’s something really, some reason to do that. Then—no, no, it is the opposite, it has really hurt. I think we need to fix this.

    Davis: Yeah.

    Sharma: We need to put this [Cross talk] the moment we come back.

    Davis: Yeah, but I wanna suggest that—yeah, but I wanna challenge that assumption, which is that I hire leadership from within my network. Maybe that right there is the thing that we need to work on.

    Sharma: Well, I’m with you. We need to work on it. What I’m saying is—that’s what I was saying. I was saying that what we tend to go, tend to—we tend to grow our network to find leadership role people, right? People in leadership.

    Davis: Yeah.

    Sharma: When you can’t grow your network, you’re reliant on what’s already in your network, right? I mean, otherwise, you’re scouring LinkedIn or some other website or pinging people in your network asking for referrals.

    Davis: Yeah.

    Sharma: But that network stalled. That network didn’t grow. I can’t point to 50 people I met in the last year who were cool and interesting who I did not know before who were underrepresented minorities have I would have met, had I gone to Reinvent or IBM Think or, you know, DevOps World or KubeCon or whatever. All the people I would have met, I didn’t meet them.

    Shimel: So, that’s a whole other thing. Virtual events, right?

    Ashley: Mm-hmm.

    Shimel: We’ve all spent significant portions of our lives at conferences. Cornelia, that’s where I usually see you is at conferences—Sanjeev, as well. Virtual events are cool. We put on one a month here at MediaOps. Gene Kim does his DevOps Enterprise Summit virtually, people even paid money to attend it.

    And all of the virtual events, they try to do a social thing to it. It’s just not very good, frankly. It just—it’s just not the same as being in the hallway or grabbing a drink at the bar or a soda or whatever, you don’t have to be drinking. But, you know, just not—it’s not that, someone said it before, face to face, person to person. I think it was Cornelia, you recently had an in person. It’s not the same, it’s not the same.

    I mean, so, different than the three of you, Mitchell and I have had a chance to meet hundreds of new people this year. I do three to four to five of these interviews a day. My day starts with talking to people in Asia or Israel and goes to Europe and through the Americas, all the way to the West Coast. And what I’ve found is that I’ve become a resource for people like you, Sanjeev, who say, “Hey, I’m looking for someone to head up cloud or DevOps or testing” or what have you. And I go through, who have I interviewed recently?

    But that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. And the question is—and we’re getting near on time—I wanna bring it back to DevOps and software, right? And, you know, what—

    Chase: I think you touched upon it from the beginning, Alan, it’s the Internet. You know, the fact that our technology infrastructure was able to shoulder the burden, that was pretty incredible to me, too. You know, I expected Zoom to go out for weeks, if you will. But I think it demonstrated that the technology infrastructure we have is pretty solid. You know, it allowed us to scale up pretty quickly, pretty massively and, you know, there were outages here and there, but I would’ve expected a lot more.

    Shimel: Minimal—minimal. Even counting all the DDoS attacks and the ransomware and all of that nonsense, it was still minimal.

    So, we had that infrastructure, but we also had this incredible capability to accelerate, to automate that DevOps kind of has been teaching us for seven, eight, nine years or more now, right? And that really helped. Curbside pickup and the—it’s not just curbside pickup, it’s the back end, obviously, right, that allows you to pull into that parking space and hit the button and say, “I’m here, and this is the car I’m in,” right? That kinda stuff, how many companies and jobs were saved by that kind of capability.

    Chase: The other thing for me internally is, I think it also opened up the ability to question everything, just because—at all levels, you know? Whether you’re designing a new feature, adding something to a product, designing a new process—is that the right thing, just because we’ve done it like that? I mean, really question it, because I think it, I mentioned this before. I think the opportunities ________ are endless now, really.

    We haven’t even started to take advantage of the things we’ve learned. I believe we’re starting to now, as Sanjeev mentioned, the pendulum coming back. Part of that is some massive learnings that we’ve also had forced upon us, if you will. But I think we’re gonna come through it even stronger and better, for sure.

    Davis: Yeah.

    Sharma: I think the—

    Davis: You know, I wanna, I’d love to chime in on—

    Shimel: Go ahead, Cornelia.

    Davis: – yeah, I’d love to chime in on that scale. You used the word scale and these systems were able to scale and handle just a tremendous surge in traffic.

    Shimel: Oh, yeah.

    Davis: And when you said that, it took me immediately back to a DevOps Enterprise Summit where Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble—and those of you who don’t know them, you should know them.

    Chase: Yeah, we know them.

    Davis: State of the DevOps Report, State of the DevOps Report, the book Accelerate. I remember this moment where they were on stage, and Jez Humble, in his very humble way, hand in his pockets, says, “Turns out, architecture matters.”

    Shimel: Yeah. Right.

    Davis: And so, it’s having these systems that are designed to scale, and we find so many enterprises that have said, “Oh, well, you know what? Google scale, Amazon scale, that’s not a problem that I need to face.” Well, surprise—

    Chase: Yeah, it is.

    Shimel: It is.

    Davis: – maybe it is. And so, architecture matters, and so I can’t help, as a software architect, coming back to that and saying, “Yep, there ya go.” [Laughter]

    Shimel: Yep, [Cross talk].

    Sharma: And I think we’ve seen companies who were—there’s two ways to look at it. One way is to look at it from a scale perspective. The other way is to look at it from a resilience and reliability perspective.

    Davis: Right, yeah.

    Sharma: Right? Which are two aspects of the same thing. It’s all architecture. And I think companies realize very early that reliability and resilience are critical—resilience to be able to make changes rapidly, right? Today, I have, I don’t have curbside pickup, tomorrow I have. Today, I had 10 people doing this, tomorrow I’m gonna have 200 people doing this.

    Ashley: Right.

    Sharma: Today, I had a teller sitting in front of her terminal, so the user interface didn’t need to be that cool. You know, the things could hang and the teller could, you know, make sense, make small talk while the system is catching up. Well, nobody’s accepting that on the mobile app when they’re directly dealing with the website or the mobile.

    So, I think that whole shift on resilience and reliability are real, are important, and all that goes back to your point, Cornelia, to architecture. That was front and center to people, and I think [Cross talk]—

    Chase: Yeah. And I think along with that, Sanjeev, is security. I think security, this really exposed—we have to do more in security. We have to do more, you know?

    Ashley: We have to rethink security.

    Chase: I think that’s one of the chief learnings.

    Shimel: No doubt about that. Guys, I hate to do this to you, but I need to pull the plug on this. We already have people in my waiting room for our next interview.

    What a great panel this is. We’re gonna have to rerun this again and go to a part two, because there’s things I wanna talk to about this as well. I spoke to a guy today who started a new, he calls it the mobile cloud for gaming, it’s called Now.gg. Because their research is that our kids, you know, these digital natives, if they don’t get a response in half a second, they’re gone, they’re onto the next thing. And so, what does that mean for your banking apps? What does it mean for we’re doing?

    But we need to end this. Sanjeev, Cornelia, Kurt—man, thank you, guys, so much. Thank you, all, so much for making this an amazing panel. Thank all of our viewers out here for watching this; we hope you enjoyed it. Mitchell, I’m gonna let you take it home.

    Ashley: Well, I think—what a fascinating group and wonderful things to say. I think the biggest learning for me—and I really appreciate Cornelia and Sanjeev talking about the lost opportunity we had through networking to help people come together and expand their networks. So, let’s invest in that going forward. We need to rebuild those and make that happen. So, I appreciate—I really wanna thank you for helping me understand that better.

    Shimel: Absolutely. Many thanks to Tricentis for sponsoring this episode of DevOps Unbound. We’ll be back in two weeks with a fresh episode, a new panel, a new topic, but hopefully it’s just as interesting a conversation.

    This is Alan Shimel for MediaOps. Until next time, be safe and be well.

    [End of Audio]

  • Why AIOps Is Critical for Pandemic Business Recovery

    Why AIOps Is Critical for Pandemic Business Recovery

    As businesses worked to stay afloat over the last year, innovation in many areas fell behind. Business leaders struggled to understand the short-term and long-term impact the COVID-19 pandemic would have on their business, while employees worried about losing their jobs and customers scrambled to rearrange budgets. As we near the end and can finally see light at the end of the tunnel, business leaders are looking for ways to get back on track.

    Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) is the solution many businesses need to free up resources and return their focus to innovation. The data speaks for itself—the AIOps market was valued at $13.51 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow by more than 200% to $40.51 billion over the next five years. AIOps presents several benefits to enterprises, like automating mundane tasks, providing actionable reporting and improving risk management.

    But before IT leaders jump headfirst into adopting AIOps, there’s still one common misconception they must address: AIOps isn’t a solution, it’s a long-term strategy. AIOps simply cannot be viewed as a band-aid on the road to recovery. To truly maximize the benefits and bring innovation back to the center of business focus post-pandemic, teams must view AIOps as a long-term strategic investment.

    For IT teams looking to adopt an AIOps strategy, consider these three takeaways to jumpstart the journey and maintain it in the long term.

    Find a Partner to Offer Market Insight

    On the road to recovery, IT leaders may not have the time or bandwidth to truly invest what it takes to implement a robust AIOps investment strategy—let alone where to start. But working with a trusted, experienced partner who does have the time and resources to map out a plan and who keeps a close eye on market trends can help ease any struggles that IT leaders may face.

    A strategic partner can also help teams identify what tools IT teams already have in place that will support an AIOps strategy and which will stand in the way of it. Through a comprehensive tools rationalization process, IT teams have a better grasp of what tools they have in place, which are performing overlapping capabilities (in other words, increasing unnecessary costs) and what tools they still need to support their AIOps journey.

    The right partner can plot a path forward for IT leaders and give them peace of mind knowing they have an expert in their back pocket at all times.

    Identify Use Cases

    Use cases for AIOps may have changed over the course of the last year depending on a company’s place in the market, product focus and future growth plans. But as companies bring innovation back to the forefront, they must reevaluate their use cases for AIOps. If you’re an IT leader looking to invest in AIOps, ask yourself ‘Why?’ and determine precisely how AIOps can support that end goal. Your trusted partner can help by giving a different perspective that IT leaders may not have, simply because they are in the weeds day in and day out.

    Build a Plan and Execute

    With the right tools in place and a partner by your side, it’s time to lay out your complete AIOps investment plan with actionable steps in place. Consider the use cases you determined and your short- and long-term goals for AIOps as a starting point. Remember—this isn’t a plan with a definitive endpoint, but rather a strategy with definitive milestones that can help keep the business up and running and customers happy while maximizing internal processes.

    As IT leaders look ahead, they can regain confidence and feel empowered to bring innovation back to the business. No longer should they feel like they’re drowning in incidents and constantly putting out fires. With a long-term AIOps plan in place, IT teams are equipped to thrive post-pandemic and come out on the other side stronger than ever.

  • How the Pandemic Renewed Respect for the Agile Mindset

    How the Pandemic Renewed Respect for the Agile Mindset

    Agile methodologies were introduced to us around 10 years ago. In that time, we have seen technology advance at breakneck speed and faced many new challenges in the way we work; arguably, never more so than in 2020.

    However, despite the abundance of change we have experienced, the core values of Agile have stood the test of time. Yes, Agile has been agile, adapting to fit our individual needs. But its values and principles are so strong that they ring true for each and every organization touched by this way of working.

    It’s impossible not to mention 2020, and how Agile shifted and adapted to help us through this turbulent time. What did we notice? Well, much like the renewed gratification you feel for your automotive breakdown service when your car gives up the ghost for the first time in years, we noticed that the COVID-19 pandemic changed Agile in a different way: by providing renewed respect for the agile mindset.

    What is the Agile Mindset?

    When we talk about the agile mindset, we’re referring to the core values that combine to establish a set of attitudes held by those embracing agility. There are four of these core values: Make people awesome, deliver value continuously, make safety a prerequisite and experiment and learn rapidly.

    All four values are of equal importance, but they each have a unique impact on the mindset. For example, making safety a prerequisite means providing employees with the confidence to experiment, innovate and not fear mistakes or failure – these are all natural on our path to achieving new things.

    Additionally, delivering value frequently benefits both our customers and employees. It takes away the pressure of bouncing from one milestone to the next and adds value to a consistent level of delivery. Our customers are happy and grateful, seeing constant developments and improvements to what we provide them.

    The final two values (make people awesome and experiment and learn rapidly) are those that were particularly important during the change and adversity of 2020. Let’s dive into them.

    Making People Awesome!

    Agile methodology is massively focused on people: both employees and customers. When we work in an agile way, we want to enrich our people and give them the freedom to express themselves and show off their skills. This, in turn, helps the entire organization to deliver excellent service to our customers.

    With such a focus on people, the mandate for remote work brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic introduced an obstacle to agile ways of working. Our only human interaction with colleagues and customers was through a screen, which, let’s be honest, just isn’t the same as interacting in person.

    Therefore, employee engagement has become more important than ever. Virtual interactions make it harder to truly see how somebody is feeling about work – whether they are happy or unhappy, motivated or unmotivated. It’s important to check in with everybody regularly; ask them directly how they’re doing and encourage honest answers. Keep the Agile team spirit alive by making an effort to break the screen barrier during meetings.

    There are benefits of remote working for Agile, too. For example, it offers a fantastic work-life balance. When employees are less pressured by commuting or less exhausted by the constant energy of the office, they are happier. And happy employees make happy customers!

    So, the value of Agile’s ‘Make people awesome’ tenet became even more important and respected in 2020. We realized that we must optimize our employees so that they can bring their best selves to work, even during uncertain times.

    Experiment and Learn Rapidly

    This been an incredibly important value, hasn’t it? For lots of us, remote working was a brand-new experience. Perhaps we’d spend the odd day working from the sofa to let the boiler engineer in, but five days a week from home – unprecedented!

    Learning and innovating at speed has been key to being able to work effectively from home. We’ve been truly embracing this aspect of the Agile mindset. But how? Essential to agility is the ability to critically review how we operate. Almost half of businesses say they do this every quarter (43%) and 21% say they do this every six months.

    Regularly reviewing and analyzing how we work helps us to identify areas of improvement, areas that we could experiment with innovation, and gaps in our knowledge. Without this, we’d be walking through our working life with a blindfold on, and likely not be able to pivot in the face of change and adversity.

    A great example of the renewed respect given to the ‘experiment and learn rapidly’ value is the COVID-19 vaccine. It normally takes years to develop, test and roll out a vaccine, but we’ve seen this happen in just months.

    You wouldn’t be mocked for not knowing that the vaccine was being developed way before the pandemic of 2020. In fact, scientists began preparing for ‘Disease X’ over four years ago. They analyzed the response to the Ebola outbreak of 2014 and recognized a need to develop a vaccine that could be used quickly, for an infection that did not yet exist.

    Fast-forward to COVID-19, and while scientists still had lots of work to do to prepare a specific vaccine (designing; initiating the correct immune response; testing and more testing and roll out), their agility, started years ago, meant they had a strong foundation on which to build.

    This value has definitely received more recognition in recent months. This is great, because it’s going to be vital for the continued response to our changing world. We must continue to analyze our response to new ways of working and adapt based on what we find. Are you already experimenting and learning to be ready for the new normal?

    An Essential Mindset for Remote Teams

    The core values of agility have had a huge part to play in our adaptation to the changes we saw in 2020. And many of us have embodied this agile mindset without even realizing – we’re calling this ‘unconscious agility.’

    If you’ve tried something new in the face of remote working, made a conscious effort to deliver value continuously rather than in big chunks, checked in more regularly with your colleagues or relayed the message that mistakes and failure are a natural part of innovation, you’ve been working in an agile way. Even if your organization doesn’t consciously work agile, you can still embody this mindset.

    And it’s going to be key for the new normal – we should already be looking ahead to that. We didn’t have time to prepare for what came in 2020 – it was somewhat of a surprise. But we do have time to prepare for what comes next, and the Agile mindset is key for tackling this successfully.