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What do I find most surprising about too many IT shops in 2024? It’s the still prevalent attitude of “treat us like a black box” to their business while also entirely out of touch with the end customer. I get it. Back in the day, which is further back than I am going to disclose, I also believed IT should be a black box. Just give us your requirements, and we’ll make it happen. Over the years, I understood that “we are all the business.” You need to be able to trace how you, the engineer, the architect, or the manager directly impact the customer experience to know if you are building and working on the right things. ...

“My door is always open.” But is that really enough? You’ve heard this one before and maybe have used it yourself. Even assuming sincerity on the part of the leader with the open door, it’s still problematic. I was reminded of this when chatting with Chris Blackburn, and the topic of Gemba walks came up. In Japanese (and Lean thinking), Gemba is the place of actual work. It’s where the value creation happens. ...

It doesn’t have to be the individual genius that drives innovation–community and location can do more to foster creativity and innovation. While kicking off the IT Revolution’s Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit last month, Gene Kim introduced me to scenius, a word suggested by Brian Eno in 1996. Brian said, “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.” ...

Exciting New Chapter Ahead! After nearly eight incredible years at Slalom, I decided to embark on a new journey last month. No drama here – this wasn’t another layoff or a falling out. Instead, the timing was perfect for self-authoring and spending the summer with my daughters while they still find me somewhat interesting. I feel that stepping back occasionally is a critical and undervalued growth move for senior leaders who can take the time. ...

I was chatting with Ben Grossman-Kahn M.Ed., and was reminded of his Goats and Fences empowerment lesson, which I still frequently share when coaching leaders to empower their teams. Check out the less than 3-minute video Ben and team put together back in the day:

As a big fan of Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais’s Team Topologies book, I was excited when Emma Button pointed me toward this awesome repo of Team Topologies graphics/icons for all of your favorite tools (including paper!).

Lately, the most common request I get from CIOs is about what they should focus on and what other companies are doing that they should be getting a start on. I have the same answer for most of them. The biggest unlock they can provide is not centered around a technology or specific process. It’s around viewing technology delivery as a sociotechnical problem space to be holistically optimized. This means (over time) shifting the entire technology and product organization to become a value stream-aligned org with a pull-through work model (vs. submitting tickets and pushing into a queue). Do this by centering team models around four types, as outlined in the book “Team Topologies” by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais: ...

Last week, I was privileged to be given an early copy of the latest book by Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization. This happily coincided with a solo weekend trip to the Washington coast I had already planned–what I would soon learn was my version of personal slowification, simplification, and amplification. This latest book is aimed at the most senior leaders of an organization, those responsible for the wiring of its sociotechnical system, and I can’t recommend it to them enough. ...

I participated in a panel discussion with Fedscoop about how government agencies are using the public cloud to modernize. Read more here: FedScoop YouTube

Originally posted on Medium Introduction In my role as a Cloud and SRE Practice Lead at Slalom Build, I am fortunate to talk to a wide range of organizations, from smaller mid-market companies all the way to astoundingly large and complex enterprises, all from an equally wide range of industries. There is no doubt about it, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is the latest hot topic. These companies are looking to reduce the impact and risk of failure that can come from moving quickly at scale with increasingly complex systems. ...