Las Vegas 2019

Tuesday Opening Remarks

Day 2 begins.

GK

Gene Kim

Founder and Author, IT Revolution

JG

Jeff Gallimore

Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Excella

Transcript

00:00:02

Good morning, welcome to day two. Uh, how was last night less? Um, did everyone have a good time last night? Uh, awesome. Fantastic. Um, I have to say thank you to everyone for, uh, this, uh, moment yesterday. Uh, it was, um, a I'll show you what I saw from stage. Um, oh, um, well imagine a picture of 2000 people wearing unicorns, uh, hats of staring at you and applauding. I was such a surprise to me and it will truly be a memory that I will treasure forever. And so thanks to my wife and boss, Margaret Kim, uh, CEO of it revolution who pulled that off. I honestly had no idea what was going on. Uh, so thank you to all of you. Um, so that was a surreal moment, but maybe not as surreal as this, um, big, scary unicorn as it turns out. So I screamed and it turns out that it was my buddy, Eric Ledyard, um, not so long ago, he was a recovering SVP at a large large bank.

00:01:11

And, uh, now he's running around in a unicorn outfit. That is a pretty strange world. We live in, uh, seriously, congratulations for kicking by the service. Now keep doing what you're doing, Eric. Um, that was, uh, truly one of the most, uh, peculiar moments in my professional career. Uh, yesterday in my introductory remarks, I described, uh, some of the goals that we have in the programming that we created for you. Uh, today, I'd like to just take a little bit of time to talk about specifically why we created the talks and have them structured the way they are. Um, and speaking around the experience reports, uh, the business technology divide and expert talks. So you may have noticed that most of the talks are into giving it in the form of experience reports. And the reason for this is my belief that as adult learners, um, it's actually the equipment of literature that says, uh, adult learners.

00:02:05

We don't, uh, we, here, we learn from hearing what, how people solve problems. We don't learn from people telling us what to do, uh, especially what they think we should do, right. We really what we want to, and we actually learned less by classroom lectures, uh, you know, where we have classrooms, but more through experiential learning. Uh, and so, uh, what we love, uh, I think it has been very effective is when people say here's a problem that I had, uh, here's why it mattered. Uh, here's what I did. Here's the outcomes. And, uh, you know, she was the problems that still remain. And that is indeed the experience format that we're used, uh, for almost all of the, uh, talks in the sessions that aren't expert talks. And so specifically each one, the speakers are saying, what industry do we compete in? Uh, how, where, what is my role and where do I fit in, in the giant behemoth organization?

00:02:55

Um, I work within what is the business problem that we set out to solve? Uh, where did we start and why, what did we do, including tools and techniques, uh, what were the outcomes? And here's the challenges that still remain. And what I find so interesting is that this is actually very close to the scientific method, right? Where we stayed at hypothesis, we performed experiment, uh, confirm or disprove the hypothesis and repeat. So I think it's no wonder, uh, that, uh, this is so effective in terms of disseminating, um, things that work or may not work. So, uh, that's why the, you hear talks given in this specific format. The other thing I want to mention that has greatly affected the way we construct this conference, um, I think began all the way back at our first conference at DevOps enterprise 2014 and what was so astonishing.

00:03:46

And that was also a three-day conference, was there was such a universality to the problems that we face in large complex organizations, independent of company size, independent of the age of the organization, what industry we compete in the problems were almost all the same and which actually should make sense, right? Because the Phoenix project, I think resonated with a great number of people, right? Even though not every company is an automotive parts retailer, uh, but there was a feeling that there's something genuinely exciting and went is happening now that we're on a similar journey. And, but what I did not appreciate until almost a year later was how much this community loves helping each other. And, and so, uh, yesterday we got to see Heather Mickman, uh, from Optum, uh, open up, uh, day one and turns out she was actually the first speaker, uh, when she was a senior director of gentlemen at target presenting with her colleague Ross Clanton.

00:04:34

Um, and so yes, that was a phenomenal Toco was an amazing, uh, some experience reports that they gave over three years. But the big surprise to me was the fact, um, of what they did afterwards. So I got invited to this, uh, event at target in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And, uh, I heard it was like a, for their internal executives. Uh, what I didn't know was that they had invited, uh, a great majority, a significant number of the DevOps enterprise speakers to whether it was, it was from Courtney Kissler. She was back at Nordstrom back then Johnny Wood Ridge was a, from a British retailer, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, uh, Jason Cox from Disney. Uh, and so what I found so astonishing was their goal was to replicate the dev ops enterprise experience, but for their executives and had been corresponding with, uh, their fellow travelers, uh, in order to do that.

00:05:19

And I thought that was just one of the most, that was just one of many, many examples of how this community has been working together, helping each other, achieve their goals often from competing organizations. And I think, you know, 15, 20 years ago, that would have been unheard of. Uh, and so that's something that I just genuinely admire, uh, and appreciate. And so I want to introduce to you a concept called seniors. And so Brian Eno is famous for many things. Uh, he's a record producer, a visual artists. Uh, he helps invent the sound for, uh, famous bands like U2, Divo talking heads, they've buoy and many more, but he's also credited for creating this term seniors. Um, and, uh, Kevin Kelly, who is famous for his work at wired magazine, he's, uh, he quoted, I'm quoting him, um, you know, said Spicer work mythology, lone geniuses do not drive most scientific cultural business and policy advances breakthroughs instead come from a scene, an exceptionally productive community of practice that develops novel at pesto piston mimic norms, major innovation may indeed take a genius, but the genius is in part created by a seniors.

00:06:27

It's the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene is a communal form of the concept of genius. Individuals immersed in the seniors will blossom and produce their best work when buoy buy a CD to act like a genius, your like-minded peers and the entire environment inspire you. Um, and what I've found so remarkable is that there are specific characteristics of a great seniors mutual appreciation, risky moves are applauded by the group. Subtlety appreciated, friendly competition goes to shy, seems to be thought of as the best of peer pressure. Certainly something we see in the DevOps enterprise community, rapid exchange of tools and techniques as something is invented is flaunted. And then shared just like we see, uh, in every talk here at DevOps enterprise ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside of a common language and sensibility. Uh, some certainly we see this in this community and third network effects of success when a record is broken, a hit happens or breakthroughs erupt.

00:07:21

The successes claimed not just by the individual, but the entire scene and this empowers and propels the scene to further successes. And this is what I love so much about the achievements of this community. Uh, and I'm so honored to help Chronicle and create conditions for that. Um, you know, within this conference. Um, just one little side note, uh, I think there's also a very similar similarity between the notion of seniors and what Dr. Thomas Kuhn wrote in his famous book to structure a scientific revolution. Uh, this is a book that introduced the notion of paradigm shifts, inflection points, right? I described that whenever a scientific revolution occurs, it looks like it was created by one person, whether it was Copernicus or Newton or Einstein, but it turns out that if you zoom in, there were actually many, many people working in the field sometime in competition, sometime in cooperation.

00:08:09

Um, but in a moment, right, it's like a phase shift, everyone from one from believing one way. And then, uh, we shifted how we view the world. So, uh, given one minute left, um, skip, skip. So I will make this claim, uh, for those of you saw Dr. McPherson's talk over the years, I, he introduced us to the work of Dr. Carlotta Perez. Um, and there's basically, she writes about the five ages, um, of revolutions each caused by the rapid and, um, significant diminishing of cost of motor production. And each one of them resulted in a new mode of management. So it was factory systems, subcontracting Taylorism Fordism. And I think the big question is what is next right? As we entered the age of and digital, uh, the question is what replaces our Mo our current modes of management. And my belief is based on the work of this community and the work of experts that we brought in it is really dynamic learning organizations.

00:09:08

Um, and so it is without doubt a forum. I have no doubt. I have moral certainty, right? That the people who are pioneering, uh, the practices that in 20, 30 years, they will all take for granted. Now are being pioneered here. It is the creation of these modern, uh, management modes, uh, done that industrial scale. So I think that's really the, the mission ahead of us, uh, in this community. And, uh, I applaud you all for that. So with that, I'm going to invite out, uh, my buddy, Jeff Palomar to, uh, help us take us into date.

00:09:46

Thanks, Jane, who had a great day one? Okay. Who's ready for a great day, too. Okay. So more people are ready for a great day two, then had a great day one. That's cool. That's cool. We're on the upswing here. There we go. Okay. Who had a great time of the unicorn party last night? Alright, thank you to CloudBees again, for sponsoring that we got a lot of us got copies of the unicorn project. Now just qualified that some of you didn't have as great as time as you probably could have because you stood the long line and you didn't get a book. We actually ran out of books and of time. We had ordered a lot of books, uh, thinking we were actually over ordering. We ordered then even more books thinking that we were over ordering still, and we still ran out. So Margaret Kim who's the CEO of it. Revolution is working hard today to figure out how we can get some more books here so that the people who didn't get a book last night that stood in line, uh, can get a book before y'all leave today. So stay tuned for that.

00:10:58

So here's another great thing about the event last night. This is a picture that I took from the very back of the room. No donuts, everybody was croissants last night. It was wonderful. Okay. Get those session evaluations in, remember sharing is caring. We've got the session slides available from yesterday on Dropbox and get hub. Here are the links they're also posted in slack. We have the networking time again today. Today is the last time that we're going to do this networking time with the speaker's corner of the lean coffee and the birds of a feather. So if you didn't participate in a particularly the lean coffee yesterday, do that today. The speakers again, will be available up in the mezzanine, uh, Chelsea mezzanine, and then the birds of a feather is in the Belmont corridor, which is to the right of the expo hall.

00:11:53

Great. We also have another opportunity tonight. Who's who's either seen or done a lightening talk. These are a blast. If you haven't seen these, these are amazing. Uh, they are 20 slides, five minutes, auto advancing every 15 seconds. It's one of the hardest talk formats to deliver because you have no control over the slides and the advancing. And the timing of that Sonatype is sponsoring that tonight. It's going to be awesome. It's going to be right here in the Chelsea. And then right after lightning talks, we're going to have book signings. So we're going to have a bunch of authors, uh, spread around Chelsea and out in the foyer, uh, who are going to be signing their books. It will be great. Get, make sure that you get a copy of that. Thanks to the founding sponsor. It revolution our platinum plus sponsors. Our platinum classic sponsors, our gold sponsors, our silver sponsors make sure that you, uh, learn about them and what, uh, and how they can help us in our journeys next door in the expo hall.

00:13:01

And while you're doing that play the unicorn game. We had some winners yesterday. There were some really aggressive people who went right after finding all 23 unicorns. And I think finished, finished up like in the morning. It was crazy and awesome at the same time, uh, get into the unicorn game, play that. And then also on the back of your badges, there's the sponsor passport. As you're talking to our sponsors, get your badge stamped and then sign it very important. Uh, I drop it off at the it revolution booth, uh, outside the expo hall. Remember sponsors add sparkle, and if you didn't hit, get enough unicorns already. We still have the unicorn project offer. Here are the steps order on Barnes and noble.com. Bring your receipt to the it revolution or the merchandise booth outside the expo hall. And remember the offer expires at noon tomorrow. And by the way, the 22 books, you don't have to carry them home. We will ship them to you. Yes, yes, you can. Pre-order those, in fact, that's the only way that you can get them. Another Marguerite Marguerite's heroics will be for today and tomorrow. I hope. All right. Get ready for a great day too. Back to Eugene. Thank you, Jeff.