What Is DevOps? | the agile admin. DevOps is a term for a group of concepts that, while not all new, have catalyzed into a movement and are rapidly spreading throughout the technical community. Like any new and popular term, people have somewhat confused and sometimes contradictory impressions of what it is. Here’s my take on how DevOps can be usefully defined; I propose this definition as a standard framework to more clearly discuss the various issues DevOps covers. Like “Quality” or “Agile,” DevOps is a large enough concept that it requires some nuance to fully understand. Definition of DevOps DevOps is a new term emerging from the collision of two major related trends. One definition Jez Humble explained to me is that DevOps is “a cross-disciplinary community of practice dedicated to the study of building, evolving and operating rapidly-changing resilient systems at scale.”
That’s good and meaty, but it may be a little too esoteric and specific to Internet startup types. Definition In Depth History of DevOps. The enlightened CIO’s guide to running projects - David Gollan. When David Gollan became group CIO at Perth health fund HBF, he discovered that the 25 projects delivered by IT each year took far too long, were over budget or schedule and could not demonstrate value to the business. Governance was also haphazard at best. Recent changes to the HBF business model meant IT also faced doubling the number of projects they delivered in half the time. Time-to-market had now become critical. HBF used a systematic diagnostic and targeted improvement approach that could get it past its current project delivery inertia and improve performance. The approach had to meet Gollan’s fundamental belief that portfolio, program and project, resource management and strict governance should be in place.
It needed to cover these foundational capabilities without wasting time on less important matters such as maturity assessments, methodology reviews or compliance issues. Embarking on any PPM improvement program can be challenging for many reasons. Getting the basics right. Cannibalisation isn't a dirty word. I started thinking about cannibalisation recently when we were discussing some new options for Gartner clients. As I was researching this post, I was reminded of a post by my colleague, Todd Berkowitz, about strategies to avoid cannibalisation.
I think Todd provides some excellent points, but I want to add another perspective to the discussion.The bottom line is that if cannibalisation occurs, and you were not expecting it, then you have made some mistakes along the way. In most cases, the idea of cannibalising a product is thought of as a very bad thing, particularly when looking at it from an inside out perspective. In many cases, investors are scared of the impact of lower priced offering on existing product revenues. This has been discussed relative to Apple, and is usually viewed solely from a numbers perspective. The other inside-out view of cannibalisation comes from product manager and P&L groups that want to protect their product revenues. Look at the world of CRM. Every company is a technology company. We are entering a new digital industry economy where everyone will be a technology company. How will you lead your organisation to compete in this digital world?
Over the course of the next six weeks, this is one of the challenges we at Gartner will explore with more than 20,000 CIOs and senior IT executives as they converge from all over the world to attend Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in the US, Japan, India, Australia, Brazil and Spain. If you’re planning on joining us, let me give you a sneak peek into one of the themes we’ll discuss during the event. If you’re not currently registered to attend, I hope to leave you thinking that you’d like to join us! I have the honor of opening Gartner Symposium/ITxpo by delivering a keynote presentation, accompanied by several of my colleagues in Gartner research.
Let me explain. We see digital disruption occurring at three levels within the private and public sectors, at different paces in different industries. Everyone becomes a technology company? Big business and start-ups: a win-win relationship. A healthy innovation culture is critical to the current, and future, performance of any economy.
But while this fact is recognised by most major enterprises today, business leaders – particularly those in Australia – must do more to engage with the start-ups that are poised to transform their markets. Partnerships between enterprises and entrepreneurs offer significant benefits for both sides: access to key decision-makers and new markets for entrepreneurs, visionary perspectives and investment opportunities for established firms. Developing and sustaining these partnerships – and capitalising on the innovation dividends which ensue – is essential to ensuring Australia’s competitiveness in a global digital economy. Mutually-Beneficial Disruption Entrepreneurial communities are a major source of new innovations which power technological and economic development; they also often act as a barometer for the mainstream products and services of the future.
Unlocking innovation’s ROI. Sketch Out Your Hypothesis. Interview Tips for CFOs: Getting the CIO You Need. More than 12 years ago, I started asking CIOs: “When you started your new job, what did you inherit?” At least 90% of the time, the answer was: “A mess. The IT organization was late and over budget on almost every project; there was no governance or project-management discipline; the business had no faith in IT.” Today I get the same response the same percentage of the time. How can this be? Why aren’t CIOs getting better at their job?
Is there something so fundamentally problematic about the relationship between IT and the business that IT leadership success is unachievable? Whatever the answer, at most companies the CIO role is a revolving door. This is a tough problem, but as legions of failed dieters will tell you, “You have to keep trying.” IBM recently released its biannual IBM Global Chief Information Officer Study, which defines four “CIO Mandates” based on what companies think they want and need from IT. 1. 2.
Mobility. Ten IT-enabled business trends for the decade ahead. Three years ago, we described ten information technology–enabled business trends that were profoundly altering the business landscape. The pace of technology change, innovation, and business adoption since then has been stunning. Consider that the world’s stock of data is now doubling every 20 months; the number of Internet-connected devices has reached 12 billion; and payments by mobile phone are hurtling toward the $1 trillion mark.
This progress both reflects the trends we described three years ago and is influencing their shape. The article that follows updates our 2010 list. (For a more detailed treatment, download the related white paper [PDF–1MB] from the McKinsey Global Institute.) The dramatic pace at which two trends have been advancing is transforming them into 21st-century business “antes”: competitive necessities for most if not all companies.
Implicit in our earlier work, and explicit in this update, is a focus on information and communication technologies. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Get ready for the great digital mailbox melee: Kohler. The other paper business that’s painfully going digital – apart from the beleaguered newspaper publishers – is mail. It’s happening rather less chaotically, and to tell you the truth it’s mostly happened already – except for all those damn bills, which still keep arriving on paper. There is now a very interesting, quite brutal, race on to win the Australian digital bills business. Australia Post has Digital MailBox; Computershare, Salmat and Zumbox, a US company, have Digital Post Australia. And they are going at it hammer and tongs, pre-launch.
Between them, Salmat and Computershare have about 80 per cent of the business of preparing paper bills for sending by Australia Post, so they already have a direct relationship with the utilities. To put a bit of sand in their gearbox, Australia Post is suing the others over the use of the word “post”, suggesting it’s passing off. The idea is simply an online version of the old post office box, accessed through a browser and password.
NBN: Fibre to the world. Independent MP Tony Windsor said famously in deciding to support Prime Minister Julia Gillard in forming a minority government in 2010 that "you do it once, you do it right, and you do it with fibre". Following the Coalition's defeat, newly appointed Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull set out to prove that doing it with fibre was not how the rest of the world was actually delivering better broadband. It's true that Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) is like no other project in the world, but no broadband investment in any one country is the same. There are many factors that determine why a company or government decides to move away from a copper network to a fibre network.
All have the same basic premise underpinning it: Provide faster internet services to the public to allow them to do more things online that have not been possible with the existing networks in place. The method usually comes down to one factor: The economics. Network types Contents:
Social media. M2M / IoT.