Gene Kim

Good morning. Welcome to the DevOps Enterprise Summit US Virtual. This is the 16th conference we've held since 2014, and the last time we convened was one and a half months ago. It was the first live conference that we've held in three years, and I thought it was absolutely incredible. So I'm so grateful that society has started returning to some semblance of normalcy and that we're able to do these kinds of conferences in real life. I thought the conference was absolutely fantastic, and my thanks to everyone who made that possible.

And so with that in mind, one of the things that we wanted to do this week was explore how we can best use the online conference format to best achieve our community goals, which I think can unlock some very exciting possibilities. Later this morning, I'll share with you what some of those might be, how we used that to inform how we put together the programming over the next three days, and I am genuinely excited about the program we've put together and some of the possibilities that we could possibly pursue in 2023.

So in this segment, as usual, I will describe the history of the conference and our goals. I'll describe the structural elements of the conference, describe some of the community norms and the notion of scenius, and the specific design decisions we made to create the Las Vegas conference as a return to live events and the corresponding choices we made to create the conference for you this week.

From the beginning, we asked, why are we here? And it boils down to three things. Now four things. One is we believe that DevOps is important. We believe that DevOps creates genuine value. More specifically, it helps our organization survive in the marketplace because it enables us to best serve our customers and all of our stakeholders. We believe that DevOps makes our work more humane. As our friend Jon Smart says, it enables us to create better value, sooner, safer, and happier. And we believe that DevOps helps unleash everyone's full creative and problem-solving potential towards a common purpose.

One of the fun things that we did for the Las Vegas Summit was actually analyze the data in the video library. So it now includes content from 16 DevOps Enterprise Summits, including Las Vegas. There are now over 1,000 talks, including the work of nearly 1,600 speakers, averaging 1.5 speakers per talk, with nearly 550 companies represented.

So from the very beginning in 2014, we wanted DevOps Enterprise to be a conference for horses, by horses. So no unicorns allowed. Unicorns are the tech giants, the Facebooks, Amazon, Netflix, Googles, Microsofts, whereas the horses are large, complex organizations across almost every industry vertical that have been around for decades or even centuries. A little trivia fact: the oldest organization that has presented is UK HMRC, Her Majesty's Revenue collection service, that was founded in the year 1200.

Over the years, we've actually been featuring more and more talks from the tech giants because I think there's so much commonality in the problems we face in technology leadership, regardless of whether we are a tech giant or a large, complex enterprise.

One of the observations I had made several years ago was that the people presenting are more senior. It's because the people presenting have been promoted and we get to follow them around in their journey, but we are also attracting more and more senior executives because our work matters to them. We specifically asked presenters to co-present with their business colleagues, with their colleagues from audit, security, and compliance, but most importantly to co-present with their business counterparts. We want those business counterparts not just to acknowledge that technology exists, but those who can say, all my goals, dreams, and aspirations came true because of my partnership with technology so we can co-create the future.

And so this analysis shows some specific analysis around job titles. What we found is that indeed, in dark blue and dark green are the highest tiers of individual contributors as well as managers. Of course we need leaders at all levels, but this just shows that our work matters to people who matter.

Someone recently asked me what are my own specific personal goals around the programming. I shared them with the programming community last year, and I want to share them with you as well. It's really to have videos of CEOs from Fortune 50 companies routinely being presented as part of DevOps Enterprise presentations. 2020 was very exciting because Ross Clanton and then-CIO Maya Leibman interviewed Doug Parker, then CEO of American Airlines, describing how technology transformation isn't just technology's job; it is every business leader's job. At eBay, Randy Shoup and Mike Wamberg had CEO Jamie Iannone present on how important their work was to advancing eBay goals. In 2022, Lutz Schuler, CEO of Virgin Media O2, described how important the work was that Sinead Hemmingway and Richard Haigh were doing, again to advance the goals of the organization.

So why is this important to me? Over the last eight, nine 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 share those CEO stories with your business leadership because they are told by people they listen to, describing how the work that you are doing matters, that the capabilities that you are building in your organizations are what will help your organization survive in the marketplace and win in the marketplace.

So that having been said, I'd like to go through the structure of this conference, whether it is virtual or live.

I think one of the hallmarks of DevOps Enterprise Summit is that it is a conference primarily made up of experience reports. Experience reports are almost always given in this form: what is my organization, and what industry are we competing in? What is my role, and where do I fit in? What is this business problem that we set out to solve? Where do we start, and why? What did we do, including tools and techniques that can be replicated? What outcomes resulted? And here are the challenges that still remain.

I love this format because it almost mirrors the scientific method, where we state a hypothesis. We perform an experiment where we can confirm or disprove our hypothesis, and other people can repeat them.

There's another reason why I love the experience report format. It's because as adult learners, as leaders, we learn less from classroom lectures. We don't learn as well from supposed experts telling us what they think we should do. Instead, we want to see how other people solve similar problems, and we can assess whether we want to replicate them based on the outcomes that they got.

Here are the experience reports that we're going to be hearing from this week, which are absolutely fantastic. One thing we are doing very differently this week is that this week we have no repeat experience reports, something that we've only done once. The reason is that we did all that in Las Vegas because we had a reunion there. This week, we are focusing on just net-new experience reports.

And so this gets to the second type of talk you will hear at DevOps Enterprise, which are the expert talks. I am so proud that over the last 16 conferences, we've had so many people, often with PhDs, sharing their experience with us. These are the areas of expertise that we think are necessary for us to get from here to there. But this conference is so much more than people with just PhDs.

One of my favorite subject-matter expert talks that we had was actually a panel in 2019. We assembled a panel of auditors from the Big Four audit firms who taught us that DevOps is not only possible to do in a secure, auditable, compliant way, but they view it as necessary in their large clients because they want their clients to still be around in 10 years.

And so this week, here are the amazing expert talks we have assembled for you. The first four talks are in bold because they are career talks. One thing that I really loved about the conference that we had in Las Vegas was from Michael Winslow from Comcast, now at Amazon Music, and he shared his career path and decisions he'd made. I loved that so much that we decided to double down on that, and now we have four talks about people sharing their specific career path decisions they've made, and I think will be applicable to so many people in this community.

That gets to the next topic, which is the notion of scenius. To set the stage for this, let me take us all the way back to DevOps Enterprise 2014. This is the first conference that we held. This is one year after The Phoenix Project came out, and this is a conference that was almost all experience reports.

My observation in 2014 was that there was a universality to the problems that we all faced in large organizations, regardless of what industry we reside in. Secondly, there was a feeling that there was something genuinely exciting and momentous happening. It took me a couple years to really understand this, but I also learned that this is a community that loves helping each other. Seeing this dynamic between people within the DevOps Enterprise community reminded me of a term that was coined by this person, Brian Eno.

He's a musician, a record producer, a visual artist, and he is best known for helping to define and reinvent the sound of some of the most popular bands in the 1980s and 90s, like U2, Devo, Talking Heads, David Bowie, and more. He wrote that 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 practice that develops novel epistemic norms, epistemic meaning modes of thinking. Major innovation may indeed take a genius, but genius is created in part by a scenius. He goes on to write, scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is a communal form of the concept of genius.

He continues: individuals immersed in a scenius will blossom and produce their best work when buoyed by scenius. You act like a genius. Your like-minded peers and the entire environment inspire you.

There are three features that have been written about, in this case by Kevin Kelly. He said one is mutual appreciation, where 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.

The second one that really struck me was rapid exchange of tools and techniques. As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they're flowing inside of common language and sensibility. If you think about how quickly things like the DevOps Dojo, like the State of DevOps research, so many things have been disseminated through this community, I think it is all examples of this.

And third, network effects of success. When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene, and this empowers the scene to further success. An example of this is the use of CEO video interviews as part of their talks, something I just have so much admiration for.

I think the problem that this particular scenius, or scene, is trying to solve is that the technology function is misunderstood by senior business leaders, and it is often over-delegated to technology leaders. We know this is wrong because everyone needs to know that amazing business outcomes are created when technology is fully integrated into all aspects of strategy and operations, where technology leaders and business leaders can co-create those outcomes.

This gets to the third point, which is the specific design objectives for this virtual conference.

At the beginning of the pandemic, as we tried to figure out how to run our first virtual conference in 2020, I wrote a blog post called My Love Letter to Conferences. The goal of that first blog post was to clarify my own thinking: what made conferences so worthwhile to me, and how conferences are structured to enable that outcome. That blog post was about 7,000 words, and here's what I learned.

I've mentioned many times I feel like I owe my entire career to conferences, and it really is true. It's at conferences where I learned who I needed to learn from, I met who I needed to meet, and many of whom became some of my favorite collaborators, some that go back over a decade. That was made so clear when I went through all of those photos from those conferences, over 800 of them. People I met that we are so familiar with in this community, I met at conferences. Everyone on the programming committee, I met at a conference.

As we returned to live events in Las Vegas, we decided to try to create three things: create a reunion party for the DevOps Enterprise Summit, and so thereby increasing the number of repeat experience reports; we wanted to meet in real life all the amazing people we met during the pandemic; and discover more amazing work that's being done by technology leaders within this community. I'm so delighted by how that came out.

Two weeks ago, I wrote another blog post defining some of our thinking about how we should use virtual conferences going forward to best enable these community goals. What came out of that was a couple of things. One is that we can enable higher-frequency events. For those of you who have done physical conferences, you know that they're hugely expensive, whereas the effort and cost behind online conferences are really dominated by the programming effort. There is no shortage of amazing stories and learning to share.

I think higher-frequency events can answer the question of how do we better enable this community to interact with each other between conferences. I can even imagine a universe where, starting maybe next year, we can even do quarterly one-day events. More on that. Stay tuned. And by the way, my thanks to James Moverley and Nick Eggleston who helped us experiment with this over the last two years.

The second thing that we can do with virtual conferences, I believe, is bring back talks where we can answer some more questions. I loved so many of the breakout talks from Las Vegas, but many of them I was left with some questions, and so I was able to ask the speakers, and we are bringing them back to share their updated presentations, new and improved. Among these presentations are the presentation from John Deere as well as the presentation from Discover Financial, and they're both plenary presentations.

The third thing that it made me realize was that there's no shortage of stories and learnings that we can share. There's so many things that this community wants to learn and can teach. I love the idea of a quarterly learning day with some combination of experience reports, lectures, birds-of-a-feather sessions, and extended Q&A sessions, and we're going to try one of those later this week.

The fourth thing is I'm starting to appreciate virtual conferences as a new medium. I've always loved that Bob Bejan quote from Microsoft. He said live events are a theatrical event, but online events are cinematic. But I am now starting to realize that only scratches the surface of what is possible. There are things that you can do in cinema that you cannot do live. I think the Avengers is probably a great high-budget movie, but it would be very difficult to make it into a great high school play. I think you're going to see hints of what's possible in this format from speakers this week.

There are two types of talks that we have. The general session, or the plenary sessions, this is one of them. This is where the dungeon master controls the game. This is where we share success stories that we celebrate, that inspire us, that elevate the bar of what we think is possible. This is where we set our language and norms and try to model them, and this is where we try to bring in experts to teach us what we need to know.

One of the things that absolutely influenced the most recent Las Vegas conference was the use of Slack, and one of the most amazing things about virtual conferences is Slack. This is something that we actually brought into the Las Vegas conference. In years past, we've had 10,000 Slack messages per day because it is so easy to interact with who we want to interact with. That's absolutely something that we want to incorporate into every one of our conferences.

The other talk is the breakout sessions, or track talks. This is where the players control the game. You control the game. You choose the talks you want to see. You seek out the people you want to interact with. As so brilliantly put by Jeffrey Frederick, co-author of Agile Conversations, he said, conferences are for conferring.

This really changed how we thought about the programming, which allowed us to think about what the real desired outcome was. It's learning, but it's also to find fellow travelers and fellow learners, to create a mutually exothermic community that actually helps each other.

We've put together an amazing set of programming for you this week. I hope this helped to share with you some of our design objectives and what we're trying to do over the next three days. With that, I want to turn it over to Jeff, who is my co-MC, and among his responsibilities are keeping all the trains running on time and helping make sure people get to where they need to go. Here's Jeff.