DevOps isn’t just a suite of tools that can revolutionize the analytic pipeline for the business; additionally, it’s a culture change throughout the organization that focuses on team empowerment, cross-team communication and collaboration, and technological automation.
Lisa Fellows, vice president of mainframe transformation at a major U.S. financial institution, will discuss how to create a successful DevOps plan for the enterprise during her SHARE New Orleans 2023 presentation, “DevOps: Adopting the Culture.”
SHARE New Orleans takes place August 13-18, 2023, at the Hyatt Regency New Orleans, and registration is now open.
“What’s important [about DevOps] is the fact that it’s two things: one is that the term is thrown out there a lot and people don’t know what it is, so I’ll be talking about what it [really] is,” Fellows says. “The other major point is companies think of DevOps in terms of the tooling pipeline; I will be presenting sources from puppet.com, which published a ‘State of DevOps’ report that points out that companies that focus on tooling and fail to promote the culture are far less successful than companies that do both.”
Her presentation will also include examples of DevOps practices, such as VSM (Value Stream Mapping) intended to further a company’s DevOps culture.
“Value Stream Mapping is a major tool that IT people can have in their toolbox that breaks down silos between teams, simplifies, and improves processes,” Fellows says.
This topic is important because DevOps — from a cultural perspective — makes companies more innovative and consistent, she explains.
“I’ve seen some trade articles saying AI is coming so DevOps is dead,” Fellows says. “That’s just not true. DevOps is a culture, no matter what we do. It’s a way for us to be more efficient, work better together, [and] be innovative. It speaks beyond stream mapping and identifying roadblocks; it’s about carving out a safe area where developers can innovate.”
DevOps, as a philosophy, also encourages workers, as a philosophy, to be more self-aware about how they do things and why they are done.
This is not the first time Fellows has attended a SHARE conference; she has been part of various SHARE projects for more than 25 years.
“I’ve been attending SHARE for a long time, and I think it does give people a good opportunity to talk with other people and see what they are doing,” Fellows says. “Any conference, SHARE or otherwise, helps people get energized and opens their mind to new things.”
She predicts there will be a lot of interest in AI at the conference, especially now with the fast evolution of generative AI tools and technologies.
“Back in the 90s, the internet revolutionized lives. I think AI is going to emerge as one of the most transformative technologies of this era,” she says.
Though many may automatically think about AI in terms of business apps, Fellows notes that from an IT perspective, AI can help with building and maintaining infrastructure, as well as training models.
“If companies like IBM and other software vendors think in terms of finding a common framework to consume data from the software stack, we can train models more quickly,” Fellows explains.
Register now and join us at SHARE New Orleans.