Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Good morning. My name is Gene Kim, and I am your emcee here at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, Europe Virtual.

I am so excited because I think this is some of the best program we've ever put together. So over the next three days, we will be bringing you amazing stories of what this community has achieved, which both inspire us and elevate the bar of what we think is possible.

So this morning, I'll go over what our goals are, both at the highest levels around our specific programming objectives, and then how we structure this conference to achieve those goals, integrating lessons learned from 14 conferences.

So ever since our first conference in 2014, I start by posing the question, why are we here? And I think that has remained largely unchanged. We all believe that DevOps is important. We all believe that DevOps creates value. More specifically, it helps our organization survive and win in the marketplace because it enables us to best serve our customers and all our stakeholders. We believe that DevOps makes our work more humane. As John Smart says, "We create better value sooner, safer, and happier." And I believe DevOps unleashes, at scale, everyone's creative and problem-solving potential towards common purpose.

So when we started this conference in 2014, it started off as a conference for horses by horses. In other words, no unicorns allowed. Unicorns as defined by the tech giants: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft. Instead, we wanted horses, as defined by large, complex organizations that have been around for decades or even centuries.

And what I love about having all the data now in the video library, I got to actually count how many talks we've had. We've had 506 enterprises with 768 speakers spanning almost every industry vertical. And this should be to no surprise, because increasingly every endeavor is a software endeavor, whether it's banking, insurance, airlines, automotive, defense, entertainment media, semiconductors, sportswear, and so forth.

So as the years go by, we do notice certain changes. We see that we have more senior people presenting. So I was able to pull all the data and pull the titles. So we have more senior leaders presenting, but it's not just leaders as defined by how many people are reporting to them. We have more senior individual contributors presenting. But one of the things I find most exciting is that we have technology leaders co-presenting with their business counterparts, people with profit and loss responsibilities, who are willing to co-present with their technology leaders. Not just acknowledge them, but saying that all my goals, dreams, hopes, and aspirations hinge upon my technology leadership counterpart to make all this so.

We've had CISOs, we've had audit directors, CEOs, and even CFOs.

So one of the things that I find so exciting about recent years' presentations is how increasingly CEOs are making an appearance, thanking the technology teams for their accomplishments and their achievements. So this started off in 2020 with American Airlines, when CIO and EVP Maya Leibman, co-presenting with our longtime friend Ross Clanton, interviewed their CEO, Doug Parker. And she asked him, "Whose job is it to transform anyway?" And he laughed. He said, "It's certainly not technology's job. It is everyone's job. And we have to hold every business leader accountable that they're delivering value, whether that customer is internal or external."

Last year, Randy Shoup, VP of Engineering and Chief Architect at eBay, presented on how they're elevating developer productivity across thousands of engineers across the organization. And CEO Jamie Iannone described how important that was to achieve their mission and described how they had to do that for three times as many teams in the following year.

So my goal is that increasingly, we'll have CEOs from Fortune 50s routinely presenting as part of DevOps Enterprise presentations.

So why do I think this is important? It's because from the very beginning, for eight years, the top obstacle verbalized by this community has been, how do I get my business leadership on board? I want you to be able to use these CEO stories with your business leadership because that story will be told by people they listen to, describing how the work that you are doing matters. So the capabilities that you are building in your organizations will help your organization survive in the marketplace, and more importantly, win in the marketplace.

So those are some of the goals around the conference. Let's talk about the structure of this conference, and specifically how it's changed as we move to a virtual format in the last two years.

So from the very beginning, this conference has been one primarily made up of experience reports. And so that begs the question, why experience reports? It's because as adult learners, as leaders, we don't learn from hearing about what someone is thinking about doing, or worse, what someone thinks we should be doing. Instead, what we really learn from is how people solve their own problems.

And so the experience report format has been this. They say: what is my organization and the industry we compete in? What is my role, and where do I fit in the organization? What is the business problem that we set out to solve? Here's where we started and why. Here's what we did, including tools and techniques so they could be replicated. Here's the outcomes that resulted, and here are the challenges that still remain.

I love this format because it closely resembles the scientific method, where we state a hypothesis. We perform an experiment to see if that hypothesis is true. We can either confirm or disprove it and repeat. And through listening to experience reports, we can understand what you learned and understand what you did and why.

So I am so excited about this year's experience reports. We have a huge representation from financial services and insurance. We have ASB, Morgan Stanley, Nationwide Building Society, Nationwide Insurance. We have an amazing presentation from Digital Healthcare Wales, UK HMRC, Schlumberger, TUI Group, Virgin Media O2, and Vodafone. So those, in fact, this year, we had the highest percentage of talks that came in through the call for presenters, which is so exciting to me because these experience reports come from the community.

So those are the experience reports. Let's talk about the second type of talk, the expert talks. These are where we invite subject matter experts to teach us things that we think are important to get from here to there. And I am so proud that over the years, we've had some of the best experts with PhDs, the best in their domain, teaching us what we need to know, whether it's Dr. Nicole Forsgren talking about developer productivity and software productivity, Dr. Steven Spear talking about learning organizations, Dr. Christina Maslach, Dr. André Martin, Dr. Dave O'Meara talking about workplace engagement and worker burnout. We've had Dr. Richard Cook and Dr. Sidney Dekker teach us about safety engineering, and Dr. Mik Kersten teaching us about architecture and developer productivity.

But this conference is so much more than people with PhDs presenting. One of my favorite examples of this format was in 2019, where we assembled a panel of auditors 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 their large clients because they want their clients to still be around in 10 years.

So here are the expert talks this year. Dr. Mik Kersten will be talking about organizational design and using the scientific method to see if we are achieving the desired results. Andrew Davis will be talking about DevOps for low-code or no-code applications like Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Workday, and so forth. David Anderson and Michael O'Reilly will be talking about their learnings from Liberty Mutual and creating the flywheel effect, which will be a book coming out next year. Dr. Steven Magill will talk about the most recent learnings from the software supply chain, as well as learnings from the Log4j event.

Admiral John Richardson, former Chief of Naval Operations, will be doing a leader development workshop with Captain Emily Bassett. This is a remarkable one-hour, 15-minute workshop that will be going on on day two.

Clarissa Lucas, Technology Audit Director, and Todd Bickley, AVP of Identity and Access Management from Nationwide Insurance, they will do an astonishing talk about an engagement model between technology leadership and audit like I've never seen before. Ben Grinnell from North Highland will be talking about DevOps for outsourcers and what needs to be done both on the client side as well as on the outsourcing side. Bill Bensing is one of the co-authors of the upcoming Investments Unlimited book and will be talking about automated governance. And Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, the co-authors of the amazing Team Topologies books, will be talking about what they've been doing around remote work.

So we held our first DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2014. This was one year after The Phoenix Project came out, and almost all the talks were experience reports. What was amazing was that there was a universality to the problems that we face in large, complex organizations. There was also a feeling that something genuinely exciting and momentous was happening.

And what I learned over the years is that this is a community that loves helping each other. Observing the dynamics between people within this community reminded me of a term coined by this person, Brian Eno, who coined the term scenius. So Brian Eno is a musician, a record producer, a visual artist, and he's best known for helping define and reinvent the sound of some of the most popular bands of the '80s and '90s, including U2, Devo, Talking Heads, and many more.

So scenius refers to these things. Despite heroic mythology, lone geniuses do not drive most scientific, cultural, business, or policy advances. Breakthroughs instead typically emerge from a scene, an exceptionally productive community of practice that develops novel epistemic norms. Major innovation may indeed take a genius, but that genius is created in part by a scenius. And by the way, I looked up recently the word epistemic. It means of or relating to knowledge or knowing. And I just must observe that you are leaders who are on the frontier of knowing, and you all model the fact it's hard to lead something and get good outcomes if you don't know what you're doing.

Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the 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.

So the specific features of a scenius include these: mutual appreciation. Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure. And this so much resonates with me, whether it's the coining of the term DevOps Dojo by Ross Clanton in 2014, the State of DevOps research that I got to do with Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble, Project to Product that were pioneered by Ross Clanton and Dr. Mik Kersten. All of those were rapidly disseminated through the community.

Scenius also features 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. And then three, network effects of success. When a record is broken, a hit happens, or a breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.

And I think all of these things so much remind me of what is happening within the DevOps Enterprise community. And so what is this common mission that we are on? It is that we all believe that the technology function is often misunderstood by senior business leaders, and it is often over-delegated to "technology leaders." So instead, we all know that amazing business outcomes are co-created between technology leaders and business leaders when technology is fully integrated into all aspects of strategy and operations.

So let's talk about the structure of this virtual conference.

So when the pandemic started, we were challenged to figure out how to run an online conference, and I started writing a blog post called "My Love Letter to Conferences." The goal was to clarify my own thinking on what made the most amazing conferences great and what were the ways that we could structure the conference to enable that outcome.

And so here's what I learned. I've mentioned many times I feel like I owe my entire career to conferences, and that is so true. It's at conferences where I learned what I need to learn and meet who I need to meet, and many who have become some of my favorite collaborators, some going back over a decade. And part of that was made so clear when I went through all my photos that I took at conferences. I want to point out that almost all my collaborators I met at conferences. In fact, I've met all of the programming committee members at a conference who have worked so hard to bring you what you're going to see over the next three days.

So one of the big aha moments when we studied online events came from Bob Bejan, Corporate Vice President of Global Events at Microsoft, and it was such an aha moment for me. He said, "Live events are a theatrical event, whereas online events are a cinematic event." It was such an aha moment for me, and the entire conference is really designed around this aha moment. So one of the biggest implications of this is that all the talks are prerecorded because it's so frustrating as a conference attendee to watch and spend 10 minutes watching a speaker just trying to get their audio working. But there are many other decisions that we made beyond just that.

This changed how we thought about the programming, which allowed us to think about what the real outcome was. It's about learning, and it's about finding fellow travelers and fellow learners to create a mutually exothermic community that is actively helping each other. Or, as my friend Jeffrey Frederick said, one of the co-authors of Agile Conversations, he said, "Conferences are for conferring."

And I am so pleased by how well this structure has worked. We've encouraged everyone to interact in common areas in Slack, and the results have been amazing. I've had personally so many great interactions. We average around 36,000 Slack messages during each conference. So to put that into perspective, the free tier of Slack only allows 10,000 messages per day before you start losing them. So we are rolling over the free tier within a day. But don't let that stress you out. We've made Slack archives of all public channels. And Jiri Kluda said, "I've been to the in-person DevOps Enterprise London conference, and I have to say I enjoy this virtual experience even more. It was easier to keep track of what was going on, to engage with other attendees in the Zoom sessions, and I had more hallway conversations than three years ago, and all the talks have been just superb."

So that "Love Letter to Conferences" blog post was 7,000 words long. But I've always believed to think clearly requires you to write clearly, and I wanted to understand what forms are universal, whether virtual or physical, and which ones could be changed to take advantage of the online format.

So in the general session or the plenary sessions, this is where the dungeon master controls the game. This part remains mostly the same. This is where we share success stories that we all celebrate, that inspire us, that help elevate the bar of what is possible. This is where we set language and norms and model them. And this is where we bring in experts to teach us what we need to know to get from here to there.

Speakers are available while their talk is airing for Q&A during the talk. This is something not possible in a live format, and many will announce additional times that they're available to talk.

So that's the general session. The second type of talk you'll see are the breakout sessions or the tracks. This is where you, the players, control the game. You get to choose which talks you want to see. You seek out the people that you want to interact with. And a bonus is that you never have to choose between two simultaneous talks because we've made all the track talks available in the video library. It makes it easier than ever to find out who the right people to go meet are. All breakout talks have already been published in the video library. All plenary session talks will be published at the end of each morning or afternoon. They will be posted with the slides and, in many cases, transcripts as well. And links to all talks will be available in the video library for you to share right away. So if you see this amazing talk that you want to share with your colleagues and friends, you can do it right away, and you don't have to wait weeks or maybe even months like in the early days.

So before I turn it over to Jeff, I just want to say this. As I'm recording this right now, I've seen every keynote talk at least two times, some of them even more. And based on what I've seen, I think this is some of the best programming that 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 these amazing talks, let's go to Jeff, who will share the user's manual for this conference.

So one thing I've noticed after attending a lot of online events is that sometimes it's very easy to get lost. You'll ask, "Where did everyone go?" Or, "What button am I supposed to push? What happens if I push the wrong button?" Wondering what I should be doing exactly right now.

So thank you to Jeff for keeping the trains running on time and making sure that everyone gets to where they need to go. And I can say from personal experience, I know that there is no one better at doing this than Jeff. Over to you, Jeff.