Introduction All sorts of reasons are used to justify Enterprise Architecture. At the top of the list is usually a desire for high efficiency and minimization of risk. In other words, Enterprise Architecture knows best. We repeatedly end up in the model because, ultimately, you can’t have the wild west in large technology organizations. Or…can you? Yes you can, with Simon Wardley’s Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners model. Take advantage of organizational theft to ensure amazing people in each of these three groups contribute to increasing the velocity and on-going sustainability of your organization. While many know about this model, the mechanics (like theft, exciting!) are counter intuitive and it is often understandably difficult to relate this to real-world problems. ...

Introduction I had the privilege of supporting two teams this past year, one that was an operations team learning development practices, and a development team that was discovering operations while introducing continuous delivery. Both approached Chef from different viewpoints, but in the end were united by this common tool set. This talk, given at ChefConf 2014, covers what I wish I had known a year ago about leading change (with specific examples), including: ...

Introduction I had the honor of delivering one of the ChefConf 2013 keynotes. It was my first time speaking at a conference and although I was extremely nervous at the beginning, it was great fun and I learned a ton. This talk discussed the challenges of trying to push a fundamental or disruptive change into large organizations, why it is difficult, why that is actually a good thing, and then showed one way to go about it along with two real-life examples from Nordstrom. ...