Adam Jacob's keynote at ChefConf 2013.

2. You are more important than you have ever
been
Adam Jacob, Chief Customer Officer
Email: adam@opscode.com
Twitter: @adamhjk

3. Who am I?
• Adam Jacob
• Chief Customer Officer, Opscode – secret code name for “Dude that wrote the first pass at Chef”
• 17 years as a Systems Administrator
• As Opscode has grown, I’ve become the guy that helps customers with gnarly problems find solutions
• A bit of advice: awesome work if you can get it

4. Why are we here?

5. The obvious reasons
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8363028@N08/3028317639/

6. I’m feeling more philosophical than that, though
www.flickr.com/photos/revdancatt/472325923/sizes/l/in/photostream/

7. We care about two things, apparently…
2http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamescridland/613445810/

8. http://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/8634021085/in/photostream/

9. Continuo
us
Deliveryhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/akrabat/8495425183/

10. http://www.flickr.com/photos/petereed/496392956/sizes/l/in/photostream/

11. And for me, personally, how was becoming a critical problem
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cjdaniel/3312922051/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kigaliwire/4426908278/

12. Getting to Why

13. The map is not the territory
• Devops is a response to, and post-
facto justification for, a shift in the
functional meaning of IT.
• Continuous Delivery is a
response to, and post-facto justification
for, a shift in expectations about the
pace of innovation in applications by
consumers of those applications
Magritte - The Pipe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MagrittePipe.jpg

14. Globalization
• Integration in commodity, capital, and labor markets
• It took 40 years for container ships to move 70% of
sea-borne trade by value (from 1968 to 2008)
• It took 22 years for internet access to reach 78%
penetration in North America (1990-2012).
• Online retail sales are 7% of all retail sales
• 75% of 2011 Thanksgiving shoppers did so online
• 42% of all retail purchases were influenced by online research
– accounting for ~50% of total retail spending.

15. Internet penetration continues to push forward globally
Source:Wikipedia, via the Internation Telecommunications Union

16. 95% of the western world own cellular phones
• 42% are Smartphones
• 58% will be on the next
purchase.
• 4.2 Billion Phones globally, for
7.09 Billion People.
http://ssiknowledgewatch.com/2012/05/09/cell-phones-approach-total-penetration-globally-with-smartphones-moving-toward-market-dominance-2/
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/1/26/digital-divide-global-household-penetration-rates-for-technology.aspx?pageid=1

17. Software is the interface for consumption

23. Let’s talk about bananas for a second
• Uganda has a huge, mainly subsistence
banana farming culture
• Cell phone coverage expanded from 46%
of the population in 2003 to 70% in 2005.
• Japanese study covered 856 households
in 96 communities.
• 41 of those had coverage in 2003, 87 did
in 2005.
• 50% to 69% increase in participation for
people who live 20 miles or more from
center
http://www.csae.ox.ac.uk/conferences/2008-edia/papers/144-muto.pdf
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shanidov/2996102037/

24. What really happened?
• Traders had better access to
farmers
• You didn’t even have to own a
cell phone to benefit!
• Still not perfect – there is still a
large information asymmetry
between the traders (who know
the prices) and the farmers (who
just want to sell their dang
bananas)

25. So how long before we get this?
Private Banana
Trader
NANA

26. This is the future of the global economy
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12495774@N02/5975495998/sizes/l/in/photostream/

27. The world of IT moved from the back office to the front
• In every business we talked about except bananas, IT was
historically a source of internal efficiency
• As more and more customers prefer digital consumption, that role
shifts to one that is increasingly customer centric – the front of the
business, not the back
• Every technology that previously
impacted only internal business functions
now directly supports customer
interactions!

28. Devops
• Is the cultural and professional movement that grew
directly from the collective experience of the pioneers of
this transition
• It’s application to traditional IT is 1:1 – the shift in
consumption will be ubiquitous.
• This means the need for the business adaptations
encapsulated in Devops will eventually be essentially
ubiquitous as well
At least, if you want to be great at the next couple
decades of global economic growth

29. Applications became customer service vehicles
• Prior to this transition, customer service
problems were mitigated by human beings
“The goal as a company is to have customer
service that is not just the best, but legendary.”
– Sam Walton (Walmart)
• They are now mitigated by software and
infrastructure updates
“If you make customers unhappy in the physical
world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you
make customers unhappy on the Internet, they
can each tell 6,000 friends.” – Jeff Bezos
(Amazon.com)

30. Continuous Delivery
• Is the discipline that grew out of this reality
• Businesses needed to be able to deliver on a better
customer experience as quickly, and safely, as
possible.
• Safety matters! Simply moving quickly towards failure is an
awfully bad customer experience, which is why we spent so
long building crazy blockades to progress in the name of
safety in the first place.
• Failure to do so will have serious impacts on
customer satisfaction and loyalty – just like it did
when Sam Walton was the Ghengis Kahn of rural
retail.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/huffstutterrobertl/5088855119/lightbox/

31. The only difference is one of perspective

32. How can we learn to be great at this?
None of us should be thought of as anything less than our potential to change the
world – Jesse Leach

33. First: we don’t confuse the map for the territory
We are here because we are building the best
possible customer experience.
These things are not good in and of
themselves – they are not ice cream.
But ice cream is delicious.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/weelakeo/3875087712/sizes/m/in/photostream/

34. http://www.flickr.com/photos/disgustipado/2593988217/sizes/o/in/photostream/
5

35. Strong cultures of personal empowerment and accountability
• The number one indicator of success
• Focus on responsibility and accountability, rather than authority, controls, and process.
• Software teams have responsibility for design, implementation, and administration of their products and services –
cradle to grave.
• Architecture, Security, Systems Administration, and QA become universal responsibilities, with experts who set
standards and build tools to enable the business to do the right thing.
• Business leaders set priorities and direction, and have close communication loops with teams doing implementation
work.
• Companies that get this wrong…
• Have a strong reliance on centralized decision making and environmental gates.
• Cannot ever point at individuals who are responsible for outcomes
• Have few, if any, capable “full stack” engineers
• Have a crap-ton of “Architects” responsible for high level design, but no real commitment to implementation

36. Treating failure as a learning opportunity, not as a dangerous
thing to be avoided
• This is a close second.
Progress on safety coincides with learning from failure. This makes punishment and learning two mutually
exclusive activities: Organizations can either learn from an accident or punish the individuals involved in it,
but hardly do both at the same time. The reason is that punishment of individuals can protect false beliefs
about basically safe systems, where humans are the least reliable components. Learning challenges and
potentially changes the belief about what creates safety. Moreover, punishment emphasizes that failures
are deviant, that they do not naturally belong in the organization...
SIDNEY W.A. DEKKER, TEN QUESTIONS ABOUT HUMAN ERROR: A NEW VIEW OF HUMAN FACTORS AND
SYSTEM SAFETY (HUMAN FACTORS IN TRANSPORTATION)
• Failure to do this causes the responsibility for a robust, fault tolerant, highly available infrastructure to
always belong to the organization, not individuals.
• Accept that failure is a normal part of the business
• No blame post-mortems

37. Service Oriented Architectures
• This is a little fuzzier, but essentially still true. They are converging towards it, if they don’t, almost
certainly.
• Service Orientation in the simplest sense!
• Several practical benefits:
• Easy to partition along failure domains
• Easy to scale (if they are built right)
• Easy to segregate work for development teams
• Not really the “Enterprise SOA”, more the fuzzy, Web 2.0 SOA
Website
API
Database

38. Cultural allergies to things that make you slow
“The number 1 thing we can’t do is get in
people’s way.”
- Phil Dibowitz, Facebook
• You need to be empowering each other to
move fast – that means trusting each
other to do the right thing, building
processes that support that trust, and
refusing to settle for ponderous, byzantine
process that creates safety through being
sluggish.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lighttable/4981112645/sizes/o/in/photostream/

39. Addicted to data – about their internal performance and users
perceptions
• Metrics are collected obsessively
• Business and Service metrics
• They try and make decisions on data rather than
emotional arguments – they measure, evaluate,
tweak, and iterate based on observable outcomes.
• Stop arguing, start measuring.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenharris/4775722590/sizes/z/in/photostream/

40. http://www.flickr.com/photos/anandham/4499539060/

41. Understand the full scope of the transition
• Successfully navigating this transition means
changing the fundamental workflows by
which the business operates
• Software Development Life-cycles
• Quality Assurance
• Operations, Security and IT Life-cycles
• Audit and Compliance controls
• Business Owner relationships
• How much or how little depends on the
shape of the company - but they are all
deeply impacted

42. Do not confuse existing structures for hard business
requirements
• Existing business structures and technology choices
are reflections of the problems of their era
• A fundamental shift in the problem necessitates
allowing a re-consideration of those choices, both
structural and technological
• Example:
• 3 teams: Operating Systems, Middleware, Application
Development
• 3 isolated solutions: Operating System installation and
patch management, Middleware configuration
management, and Application deployment
• Are these choices being made because of solid
technical reasons? Or faux business requirements?

43. Confine the blast radius, but don’t limit the magnitude of the
explosion
• With a scope of possible change that is so large, organizations
cannot try and transform the entire organization at once
• Doing so will lead to an emotionally loaded and painful bureaucratic
failure
• Reasonably so, because this approach is likely to be highly disruptive
to gross productivity
• Similarly, undertaking smaller changes organization wide often
leads to mediocrity
• This is great advice for incremental improvement
• It naturally detracts from the huge benefits that come from allowing for
whole-systems design - you’re not allowed to think holistically, only
piece-meal
• It leads to mediocre outcomes, if you want revolutionary results
• Successful transitions happen in sections of the business

44. Take a whole-systems view of your technology platform
• As the technology platform becomes the
prime delivery vehicle for customer
experience, it requires a whole-system
perspective to design and implement
• For example, choice of source code control
system deeply impacts the available
development workflows and continuous
integration platform, which can impact
asset creation and storage, which can
impact production deployment
methodologies, which impact audit and
remediation, etc.
• They think about the holistic workflow
and business process they want to
engender - then select tools to
implement, and re-enforce, that process
http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnavy/7494170678/sizes/l/in/photostream/

45. Re-enforce culture with technology, and vice versa
Tooling is culture
institutionalized
• Attempting to change how a business operates culturally with the same tools and processes that
enforced the previous culture leads to worse results than doing nothing at all
• Consider the cultural traits you want to engender or discourage, and build a technology platform
the enforces those considerations

46. Every success story I found shared these traits
Every failure lacked one or
more of them.

47. I have given you bad advice, and I am sorry.
• Tools don’t matter, culture does
• Only true if you understand the tools and the culture
• The tools matter as much as the culture – in a broken culture with a desire to change, the tooling can often lead the
way to cultural changes easier than starting with big picture human change.
• Start small and wide
• Great advice for incremental improvement. Find the bottlenecks. Fix them.
• But if your goal is revolutionary – if you can’t close your eyes and see the future clearly, with the path intact – this
leads to a slow, agonizing journey to mediocre results.
• You can bring your executives along
• You can do this if you don’t want revolutionary change.
• But this is heavy stuff – business wide, strategy changing, global economics stuff. If they don’t understand or agree,
you are doing the business a disservice by shoving it down their throat
• They’ll be happier drifting slowly into failure with incremental improvements.

48. You are the right people to transform your business
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dkeats/4128747046/sizes/o/in/photostream/

49. Your skills
increasingly
are the
business

50. Your knowledge is the critical knowledge

51. http://www.flickr.com/photos/9187876@N08/7206414932/sizes/l/in/photostream/