Gene Kim

Hello, I'm Gene Kim, and I am your emcee here at the 2021 DevOps Enterprise Summit Europe Virtual Conference. I'm so happy that you're here because we've put together an amazing three days for you, as good as any we've ever put together.

This morning I'm going to go through what our goals are, both at the highest levels and at the programming objectives level, and what's different in this online format, sharing some of the lessons learned after putting on two fantastic online conferences last year.

Since 2014, we always start each conference by asking three questions. One is, why are we here? We believe that DevOps is important. We believe that DevOps creates genuine value. More specifically, it helps our organizations survive and win in the marketplace because it enables us to better serve our customers and all our stakeholders. Third, we believe that DevOps makes our work more humane. As John Smart said, we are creating better value sooner, safer, and happier.

Since 2014, we have run twelve events. In the beginning it was just a conference in the United States, and then since 2016 it was one conference in the US and one in the UK. Since 2020, those conferences, of course, have been virtual, made necessary by the global pandemic. And yet the mission goes on. In fact, the mission may be even more important in times like this. We are in the middle of the largest economic crisis in over a century. We're in the middle of the largest health crisis in our lifetime, and we are in the middle of the most important race right now: how to get everyone on the planet vaccinated as quickly as possible.

So you may be thinking, what is this mission that I'm talking about? In the beginning, we wanted to create a conference for horses. In other words, no unicorns allowed. Who are the unicorns? They were the tech giants: Facebooks, Amazons, Netflix, Googles, and Microsofts. We didn't want stories from them. Instead, we wanted stories from large, complex organizations that have been around for decades or even centuries. I'm so proud that over the last eight years, we've had nearly 500 enterprises present, spanning almost every industry vertical from banking, insurance, retail, sportswear, manufacturing, defense, entertainment media, healthcare and government agencies, and more.

As we look back over the years, another thing that I notice is that the presenters are more senior. Many people have been promoted, and we are following their journey as they go down theirs. But we're also attracting more and more senior executives because our work matters to them. We specifically ask our presenters to co-present with their colleagues from audit, security, and compliance, and more recently to co-present with their business counterparts. We want business colleagues who aren't just tolerant of what we do in this community. Instead, we want those who are grateful because they know that all their goals, hopes, dreams, and aspirations depend upon the work that this technology community does.

Over the years, we've heard from CIOs, CTOs, chief financial officers, chief product officers, line-of-business leaders, and even CEOs. Someone asked me last year what my specific goals are around the programming. I shared my answer with the programming committee, and I'd like to share it with you as well. I would say that my goal is to have videos of CEOs from Fortune 50 companies routinely being presented in the presentations here at DevOps Enterprise by 2025, just as Maya Leibman and Russ Clanton from American Airlines did last year in the Vegas virtual conference, which we will be playing for you later today.

You may be thinking, why? Why would I care about them? The reason is, for eight years, the top obstacle being verbalized by this community has been, how do I get my business leadership on board? Through these videos, I would like you to be able to share those stories with your business leadership, because those stories are told by people that they listen to, describing how the work that you do matters, that the capabilities you are building in your organizations are what will help your organization survive in the marketplace and, more importantly, win in the marketplace.

I'm so proud that we are getting so close. Over the last two years, we've had so many senior leaders present. From RBS, we had Jenny Wood, chief operating officer for services. From Compuware, we've had Chris O'Malley, the CEO, and his CFO, Joe Aho. Last year we had, from Nationwide Building Society, Patrick Eltridge, chief operating officer, and Janet Chapman, one of the three mission leaders. Last year we also had Kimberly Johnson, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Fannie Mae, a Fortune 25 organization based in the United States. We had Ken Kennedy, EVP and president of product at CSG, co-presenting with our good friend Scott Prugh. And we had the aforementioned Maya Leibman, EVP and CIO of American Airlines. My claim is, we are getting so close.

I've talked about the mission that we're on together. Let's talk about the structure of this conference and how it differs from previous years. The most obvious part is that we are in a virtual format.

This conference has always been made up primarily of experience reports. It's because, as adult learners, as leaders, we don't learn from hearing what someone is thinking about doing, or what someone thinks we should be doing, or didactic classroom lectures. Instead, we learn from people describing how they solved their own problems. That is why every experience report really follows this format: here's my organization and the industry that we compete in; here's my role and where I fit in; here's a business problem that we set out to solve; here's where we started and why; here's what we did, including tools and techniques; here's the outcomes that resulted; and here's the challenges that still remain. What is so lovely about this is that this very much fits the scientific method, where we state a hypothesis, perform an experiment, which we confirm or disprove, then we discuss, and then repeat.

This year's experience reports are amazing. We have Adidas, H&M Group, Nationwide Building Society, Procter & Gamble, The Walt Disney Company, UK HMRC, UK Government as a Platform, American Airlines, TUI Group, GitHub, and so many more. Those are the experience reports from technology leaders who are all helping their organizations win in the marketplace.

That leads us to the second type of talk that we have here at DevOps Enterprise. These are the expert talks. I'm so proud of how many people with PhDs have shared their expertise with us, whether it was Nicole Forsgren sharing her research about what high performance looks like, Dr. Steven Spear about what dynamic learning organizations look like, Dr. Christina Maslach talking about workplace engagement and burnout, Dr. Andre Martin and Dr. Dave Almeida talking about organizational learning, Dr. Richard Cook and Dr. Sidney Dekker talking about resilience engineering, and Dr. Mik Kersten talking about how to maximize developer productivity.

This conference is so much more than people with just PhDs. One of my favorite examples was something we did in 2019, where we assembled a panel of auditors. We got someone from each one of the Big Four auditors, who taught us that not only is DevOps possible to do in a secure and auditable way, but they view it as necessary in every one of their large clients because they want their clients to still be around in ten years.

This year's expert talks include Nora Jones, Dr. Mik Kersten, Corey Quinn, former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson, Dr. Jay Guzman-Smith, John Smart, Dr. Chris Strear, Eileen Uchitelle, and Dr. Ron Westrum, who anyone who studied the State of DevOps research will be familiar with because he is the author of the famous Westrum organizational typology model.

In 2014, we held our first conference. It was one year after The Phoenix Project came out, and almost all of the presentations were experience reports. One couldn't help but notice a couple of things. One was that there was a universality to the problems being presented that we all face in large, complex organizations. Two was that there was a feeling of genuine excitement, a feeling that there was something genuinely momentous happening. I also learned that this is a community that really loves helping each other.

Observing the dynamics between people within the DevOps Enterprise community reminded me of a term coined by Brian Eno: scenius. Brian Eno is a musician, record producer, and visual artist. He's best known for helping define and reinvent the sound of some of the most popular bands of the 1980s and '90s, including U2, Devo, Talking Heads, David Bowie, and many more.

Here are the key elements of scenius. Despite heroic mythology, lone geniuses do not drive most scientific, cultural, business, or policy advances. Instead, breakthroughs typically emerge from a scene, an exceptionally productive community of practice that develops novel epistemic norms. Major innovation may indeed take a genius, but the genius is created in part by a scenius. By the way, I finally looked up the word epistemic, and it is defined as of or relating to knowledge or knowing. I'll just make a side note: you're all leaders who are on the frontier of knowing.

Second, scenius stands for the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is a communal form of the concept of genius. Individuals immersed in a scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by a scenius, you act like a genius. Your like-minded peers and the entire environment inspire you.

There are three key features of a scenius, all of which I think are so brilliantly evidenced in the DevOps Enterprise community. One is mutual appreciation. Risky moves are applauded by the group. Subtlety is appreciated. Friendly competition goads us shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure. There are so many examples of this, whether it's the DevOps Dojo pioneered by Russ Clanton in 2014, the State of DevOps research that I got to do with Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble from 2014 to 2019, and Project to Product, worked on by Russ Clanton and Dr. Mik Kersten, all rapidly being disseminated throughout the industry.

Two: rapid exchange of tools and techniques. As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside of a common language and sensibility.

Three: network effects of success. When a record is broken, a hit happens, a breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the entire scene to further success.

Here is a common journey that I think we are all on: the technology function is vastly understood by senior business leaders, and it is often over-delegated to the technology leaders. Instead, everyone needs to know that amazing business outcomes are created when technology is fully integrated into all aspects of strategy and operations. You are going to see some amazing examples of how that is being advanced in the presentations over the next three days.

Fourteen months ago, when we were first challenged to figure out how to run an online conference, I started writing a blog post called "My Love Letter to Conferences." My goal was to clarify my own thinking on what made conferences so worthwhile to me and how conferences are structured to enable that outcome. The result was an almost 7,000-word blog post. Here's what I've learned.

I've mentioned many times that I genuinely owe my entire career to conferences, and it's so true. It's at conferences where I learned what I needed to learn, I met who I needed to meet, and many of them have become some of my favorite collaborators, some going back over a decade. Part of that was made so clear when I went through all of these photos. I met John Allspaw in 2011, and that's actually where I met Dominica DeGrandis. This was at the first DevOpsDays being held in the United States by Patrick Debois. I finally met Dr. Nicole Forsgren at a conference. I met Jez Humble at a conference, as well as Dr. Mik Kersten. In fact, I met the entire programming committee, all of these people, at conferences.

The people on this programming committee, everything that you see over the past eight years is a result of their work. We meet weekly, and if you knew what they had to put up with, you'd rightly wonder why they'd even be willing to be on this programming committee. But I think it's because, like you, we all have goals and aspirations and things we want to learn that are advanced by being a part of this event.

We all studied online events, and we all loved this quote from Bob Bejan, Corporate Vice President of Global Events at Microsoft. He said, "Live events are a theatrical event, and online events are a cinematic event." This was such an aha moment for me, and this drove so many of our design decisions. The biggest implication was that we chose to have all talks be pre-recorded, because it's so frustrating as an attendee to watch a speaker spend ten minutes just trying to get their audio working. We also tried to design the interactions to enable those serendipitous interactions that we love so much in a physical event.

I'm so delighted at what the feedback has been over the past year. Jiri Klouda went to the DevOps Enterprise London event in 2017 and said, "I have to say that I enjoyed the virtual experience even more. It was easier to keep track of what was going on, to engage with other attendees in the Zoom sessions. I had more hallway conversations than three years ago, and the talks have been so superb." I thought the two online events last year were amazing. I had so many great interactions. We had over 36,000 Slack messages in our last online event. To put that into perspective, the free Slack tier only allows 10,000 messages, so we were actually rolling over messages in less than a day. Don't let that stress you out. We've made a Slack archive available of all the public channels since, I think, 2015.

I mentioned that that love letter to conferences was 7,000 words long. I've always believed that in order to think clearly requires you to be able to write clearly, and so I want to understand what forms were universal, whether virtual or physical, and which ones could be changed to take advantage of the online format.

The general session, or in other words, the plenary sessions, is where the dungeon master controls the game. This remains mostly the same. The goal here is to provide success stories that we all celebrate, that inspire us, that elevate the bar. This is where we set the community language and norms and model them on stage. This is also where we bring in experts to teach us what we all need to know.

Then the question becomes, how do we address the absence of engagement that we get in a real-life conference? The fact that all presentations are pre-recorded actually allows for an amazing dynamic that isn't possible in real life. While speakers' presentations are being aired, the speakers are available for Q&A during their talk in Slack, and many will actually announce additional times where they're available to interact with you. That is amazing.

The other type of session is the breakout sessions, or track talks. This is where the player controls the game. You choose which talks you want to see, and you seek out the people that you want to interact with based on what you want to learn. A bonus is, in an online format, you never have to choose between two simultaneous talks because we have published all track talks in the video library already. It makes it even easier to find out who you want to talk to and make arrangements as necessary. Incidentally, all of the plenary sessions will be available at the end of each morning or afternoon, so the videos and slides, and now in many cases transcripts, will be available for you to share right away. No more waiting weeks or months for them to be published.

Before I turn it over to Jeff, let me just say this. As I'm recording this, I've seen every keynote talk at least two times, some of them many more. Based on what I've seen, I think this is some of the best programming we've ever done. I'm so excited to share what we've put together for you over the next three days.

But before we go to those amazing talks, let's go to Jeff, who's going to present the user's manual for this conference. One observation I will make after attending a whole lot of online events is this: it's super easy to get lost. You may ask, "Where did everyone go? What button am I supposed to push?" You may experience fear of pushing the wrong button, and you may be wondering, "What should I be doing right now?" So thank you in advance, Jeff, for keeping the trains running on time and making sure everyone gets to where they need to go. From personal experience, I know there is no one better at doing this than Jeff. Over to you.

Jeff Gallimore

Hey, everybody, and welcome to the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2021 in Europe, and because we're virtual, around the world. Gene and the programming committee have put together yet another amazing lineup of speakers who will blow your mind with what they've done and what they know. You'll definitely get a lot of incredible insights from their talks.

But at most conferences, those talks are primarily one-way sharing, from the speaker to you in the audience. We all know we can get a ton of value from two-way interactions and two-way sharing, and we want to create those kinds of opportunities for interactions between you and the speakers and between you and each other.

Let me run through some of those opportunities, but I need to set the stage first. Prior to last year's event, we've always gotten together in person, and just like last year, this year we're not doing that. We're virtual. But we still have a lot of the same things that make the DevOps Enterprise Summit great, whether we're in person like we were prior to 2020 or virtual like we were last year. We have great speakers. We have great attendees. We have great sponsors. We have great networking opportunities. We're interacting through Slack. We have a code of conduct. We're bringing a lot of what we did last year to create a great virtual experience, so the learning and the community are still great.

Because we're always learning and improving, some things are going to be different from when we've been together in person, and even from last year when we were virtual. We have new ways of interacting with speakers and attendees and sponsors. One big way, in fact. I don't want to share the surprise just yet. Just give me another minute or two.

As you can see right now, we'll be watching the talks primarily through our browser and interacting with others primarily through Slack. Let me show you how to get around the event in your browser and in Slack. For watching the talks in your browser, navigate to Watch in the top-level menu for the event website. You can see the talks happening right now on the schedule. Or you can navigate to Schedule in the top-level menu, find the talks you want to watch, and click on Watch to watch them.

We're also interacting in Slack. Many of us use Slack for our daily work, especially these days. So we're going to use Slack for what we use it for in our daily work. We're going to engage with speakers, sponsors, and each other, both during and after the conference. The Slack workspace is going to continue on beyond the conference. You can get on board at this link on the slide, or you can go to Network in the top-level menu for the event website.

There are some important Slack channels you should be paying attention to, and I'll explain each of these as we go through the orientation of the event. We'd really appreciate it if everyone would edit their Slack profile to include more information about yourself: name, image, organization, title, pronouns, whatever you feel comfortable sharing with this community to help us learn a little bit more about you. It will improve your experience and the experience of everyone else by making things just a little more human.

Now let's talk about engaging with the speakers. This is the opportunity you have to ask the amazing speakers some questions. Because we're virtual, we get to do something a little bit different. In a physical event, when we're getting together in person, the speakers on stage are, well, speaking. In our case, the speakers will be available in Slack during their scheduled presentation time, so you can post your questions in the corresponding Ask the Speaker channel in Slack and @mention the speaker during their presentation. If you have thoughts on a question someone else asked, please contribute.

We have different Slack channels corresponding to the different programming tracks on the schedule. We have one channel for the plenary talks, and we have one channel for each of the four tracks of the schedule. Just make sure you're asking your question in the right channel. If you want to carry on a conversation after the speaker's scheduled talk time, you can take that conversation into the Ask the Speaker More channel.

Now when using Slack, remember alert fatigue is a real thing, so please be considerate of your fellow attendees and the important messages they might need to see from their teams. Please don't use @here or @channel.

We have a lot of great networking opportunities. We have a block of networking time each of the three days for you to interact with speakers and with other attendees. There are no talks and no other programming during this time, so the FOMO should be low.

Now for the big surprise. We've created a virtual conference venue for the summit in Gather. You can walk around in it, interact live with sponsors, speakers, and other attendees, and even play some games in there. You can enter the Gather space by navigating to Gather in the top-level menu for the event, or by checking out the Gather channel in Slack. Thank you to LaunchDarkly for sponsoring the space. There's more to share with you about Gather, which I'll be doing after this morning's talks right before we break.

Now let's go through the opportunities during the networking time. The first one is Birds of a Feather. These are sessions for you to find and interact with other attendees who share similar interests. The way to join a Birds of a Feather conversation is to enter the Gather virtual space and head to the Birds of a Feather room. I'll show you how to get there in just a moment. When you're in the room, just move to the area that has the topic you're interested in joining. You can also join the Birds of a Feather Slack channels for topics that interest you. Each of those channels starts with BOF. Post in Slack during and after the session. After the Birds of a Feather session ends, there's nothing that says you have to stop the conversation.

To get to the Birds of a Feather room, go into Gather and head over to the right side of the virtual space. Just go through the door marked by the arrow, and you'll be in the room where all the discussions are happening. Gather provides a remarkably similar virtual experience to the in-person Birds of a Feather sessions. If you want to engage and contribute, great. If you want to watch and listen, great. If you want to discreetly disengage to go do something else, you can do that too. We have five different Birds of a Feather channels, so there should be something that interests you.

The second networking opportunity is Lean Coffee. Yes, we're bringing this from the in-person summits we've had in the past into the virtual summit we're having now, and Courtney Kistler has taken the baton as our Lean Coffee leader. We'll do this virtually using Zoom breakout rooms and MURAL, which is a collaborative virtual whiteboard. Just join the Zoom call using the link in the Lean Coffee Slack channel, and we'll take care of the rest.

For those of you who have been to other conferences and events, you might be familiar with the law of mobility. The law of mobility says this: if you find yourself in a place where you're neither learning nor contributing, maybe like this person, then you should respectfully navigate to find a place where you can.

We have the session slides and videos available. The videos of the plenary talks are available after they air. The videos of the breakout talks are actually available right now. The slides are also available for download, both in Dropbox and in GitHub. You can access all the videos through the video library. Just navigate to Library in the top-level menu. You have personal access to the video library for seven days as part of your registration. If you want access longer or to share the videos with more people, we've created some options to make it easy to do that. Check out Slack for more info.

Because we're all part of the same community, we should treat each other well, regardless of whether we're in person or virtual. We want everyone to have an amazing time here at the summit, and our code of conduct reflects that. We've posted the code of conduct in Slack, but let me give you the gist. Listen well when someone else is sharing. Share well when you have something to say. Respect everyone at all times, and speak up if you see something or hear something that isn't consistent with the environment we want for this community.

If you have any issues, email help@itrevolution.com or direct message me, jeff.gallimore, in Slack. Now I'd like to enlist all of your support in creating the kind of harassment-free environment we want for this community. I mentioned that we've posted the code of conduct in Slack, so I'm going to give you a few seconds to go into the general channel in Slack, find that code of conduct post, and then please give it your favorite emoji to indicate your support. I'll give you a few seconds to do that.

All right. Fantastic. Thank you so much. The DevOps Enterprise Summit is brought to you by IT Revolution, the same people who bring us our favorite books like The Phoenix Project, The Unicorn Project, The DevOps Handbook, and Accelerate. A huge thanks to our premium sponsor, LaunchDarkly. We'd also like to say a big thank you to our virtual BFF sponsors, our virtual good friend sponsors, and also our media sponsor, who is getting the word out about this terrific community.

Thanks to LaunchDarkly for also sponsoring the 2021 DevOps Enterprise Journal. The journal is a collection of white papers tackling some of the biggest challenges facing this community, and it's a terrific resource. Visit the LaunchDarkly booth to get your free download.

The thank yous to our sponsors are genuine. This event doesn't happen without their support. The incredible people in the DevOps Enterprise community, you, are why we have so many awesome sponsors who want to help you in your journey. So go talk to them in the virtual expo hall. Just navigate to Expo in the top-level menu, where you can visit each sponsor at their booth. They're ready to help you. And remember, sponsors add sparkle to your DevOps journey.

Finally, we have some fun games to play. Navigate to Games in the top-level menu of the website to learn more about them. In addition to being fun, you can also win stuff. If you need any help or have any questions, you can post in the summithelp channel in Slack, you can email help@itrevolution.com, or if all else fails, you can direct message me, jeff.gallimore, in Slack.

Whew, okay. That's it. We hope you have an amazing time at the summit. Gene, let me hand it back to you to introduce the DevOps Enterprise Summit's first speaker.