Steve Brodie

Well, listen, just as we go into closing, there's a couple thank-yous that I wanted to give out.

First off, what did you guys think of the content? Good stuff?

So I really wanted to thank the speakers. They put a lot of effort and time into putting the presentations together. I thought the content was phenomenal. And also a big shout-out to the programming committee. It takes a lot of time to curate this and go through all the content. So a big thank you to the speakers and the programming committee.

Also, this thing would not be possible without some of the people behind the scenes. So I would like to thank World Events by Sonya. I'd like to thank The Good Company, who does all the AV, and also the IT Revolution staff, as well as the Electric Cloud marketing team. So a round of applause for that group.

But most importantly, I want to thank all of the attendees. I think what really makes this event great is the engagement. It's the sharing. It's the sharing of the stories. It's the listening. This would not be the event that it is without the folks that are here and sort of the great interaction that I saw out there. So a big round of applause to all of you.

Just to recap, I've had this question, and so just to say it again: all of the content, all the presentations, the video recordings of the breakout sessions, those will be made available. You'll be getting some information on how to get access to that. I know a lot of people want to leverage that and take that back into the company. So we'll be making that available.

So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Gene for some closing comments.

Gene Kim

Yeah. Thank you so much.

Why does it take two weeks? It's because everyone on calculators has to do the transcoding of the videos. That was a joke.

All right. So just a couple of closing thoughts.

One of the things that I had talked about earlier in terms of my own desires is how do we create a group that is mutually exothermic and a community that is helping each other?

And earlier this morning, I actually decided to put this quote here. I love this quote from Dr. Speer's book. It's The High-Velocity Edge:

"The result of the work that Admiral Rickover did for the U.S. Naval Reactors Corps was that young crews and their officers setting out on their first cruise could benefit from the collective experience gained from over 5,700 reactor-years of experience behind them."

And I think that's relevant because I think that's what we're doing, right? How do we accelerate those lessons learned so we can all benefit from the collective experiences, often from wildly different backgrounds and domains? I think that's the entire tribe we need to mobilize to get these incredible outcomes that we see these high-performing DevOps organizations undergo.

There's a talk that I hadn't actually seen, but Todd told me about this, and it's very provocative. It's a talk by Prasad Setty. I guess he's in the HR department at Google. And he said, "We have tried all these experience reports, and we tossed them out the window. The only ones that work are the ones from academic papers. That's where we get the best guidance from."

And at first I was like, "Oh, wait a minute, there's still good experience reports," right?

But I think what we are doing is a little different. We're not just sharing experience reports. I think we are testing practices with an underlying causal model. So Dr. Steven Spear talked about the four capabilities: see problems as they occur; swarm them until it's solved; turn local discoveries into global improvements; and four is, how do we cultivate leaders who can spread these practices throughout the organization?

So I think each one of these experience reports is actually a hypothesis. It is: if we do these things, we're going to get these results. And so I think the value of these experience reports is not just telling a story. It is actually a very specific hypothesis that if we do these things, we are going to get these desired outcomes.

Or in fact, maybe next year it would be great to have things that didn't work, as Jeff proposed to me earlier today. Thank you, Jeff, for volunteering. I would look forward to seeing that track.

So we are sharing lessons learned, especially from different domains.

There's one last quote I want to share with you. This is from Steven Johnson, who's a journalist. He wrote a book called Where Good Ideas Come From. He said, "There are a dozen metaphors for how we colloquially use to describe good ideas. We call them sparks, flashes, light bulb moments. We have brainstorms and breakthroughs, eureka moments and epiphanies, and yet none of those ideas truly capture what an idea is. A good idea is a network."

And so I feel like our objective going into this was to create the conditions where people, fellow travelers, kindred spirits who have a common goal, can help each other get there. And I think that is, for me, a very powerful idea.

So here is the help I'm looking for. One of the things that we would like to do is really understand: what are the top obstacles that are preventing you from achieving your goals? In other words, what are the top obstacles that are facing the DevOps Enterprise community? That's us.

So we asked most of the speakers to do this, but if you have specific things, and if you can keep it down to five, it would be nice. Or two. Email help@itrevolution.com and send us your, "Here's what I don't know how to do," or, "Here's the help I'm looking for." This will help us create the programming objectives for next year.

But if you have any suggestions or feedback or ideas or things that you'd like to see, please send those along as well. And you will be getting a survey in terms of asking for specific feedback. So please, when you get that, please fill it out and send it back, because feedback is love. And what's that line from The Phoenix Project? The opposite of love isn't hate, it's apathy, right? So please, we're looking for feedback.

So thank you so much. And by the way, the other thing I'd love to... Thank you all for being here. Thank you to all the speakers who had to put up with me in terms of creating the talks, and for bringing your expertise and passion. We all are very grateful, and I'm grateful for all of you. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Look forward to seeing everyone next year.