Dr. Nicole Forsgren on DevOps: ‘You Are What You Measure’

CloudBees sponsored this podcast.

Dr. Nicole Forsgren on DevOps: ‘You Are What You Measure’

Dr. Nicole Forsgren is the CEO and Chief Scientist of DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), and the principal author of the annual State of DevOps Report.  On many occasions, she’s asserted the case that “you are what you measure” — that a company’s capabilities may be either enabled or constrained by the extent to which it is capable of perceiving how it does what it does. We spoke with here about how to measure success with a new cloud native technologies.

“I think I’ll agree to the point that, when we change our technology stack and applications in order to be cloud native,” the CEO responded, “that will likely change the way we do our work, whether it’s through a direct change because we’ve changed our work, or through the measurements that we now employ to track and evaluate that work.

“I think I’ll disagree a bit, though,” she continued, “in that moving to cloud native necessarily removes people from jobs. You can move to cloud native and still have, as an example, on-prem. In that case, you haven’t necessarily removed people from jobs; they are now adopting different work roles. There’s a lot of opportunity and a lot of promise here, as we’re doing this. It doesn’t necessarily mean everyone’s going to be cut out of a job, and everyone’s getting laid off; on the other hand, we’re going to hire all these new people.”

As IT operations professionals have said, business managers and executives often lack the foresight to realize that the fundamental processes of their line of work — capacity planning, quality assurance, compliance, incident response, and Dr. Forsgren’s favorite, measurement — do not disappear like blue soap bubbles in those lucky scenarios where the infrastructure of the old world is replaced with a cloud platform. They see the cloud as a managed service — specifically, one managed by someone else.

In this Edition:

5:04: When you move to a cloud-native platform, how does it change the culture of the organization?
8:21: Opportunities for people who have existing expertise in applications and infrastructure to move organizations to cloud native.
15:05: Leveraging other’s expertise when making transitions on the job.
17:07: Is there something that would allow people to meet that change to maintain their livelihoods?
20:55: You use the terms “system” and “automate” a lot, are those synonyms for one another?
22:24: What does your data tell you about the correlation between high-performance organizations and those that are dispensing with their knowledge base in IT and system admins?