Welcome to the software economy, where developers unleash disruptive innovation at an unprecedented rate. If you are a non-trivial software business (and pretty much every non-trivial business is) then guess what? You're now competing with every other software business in the world.

Research tells us that organizations that successfully implement DevOps practices and efficient CI/CD pipelines are able to deploy faster, fail less frequently and recover more quickly from downtime. (source: DORA 2018).

Cheryl Razzell (Global Head of Digital Platform Operations, Digital Platform, at HSBC) is undergoing such a digital transformation to increase their release cadence and quality, while also improving governance and system stability. But as she eliminates bottlenecks, more appear on the horizon! In many enterprise environments, islands of information and automation still exist, adding opacity, friction, cost and risk to the software delivery process.

Some of the problems we hear include:

- Engineering not knowing how their latest change impacted system performance or user behavior

- Customer success teams viewing the wrong version of a feature flags documentation

- Ops, marketing and sales having trouble keeping up with and effectively leveraging smaller, more frequent releases

- Senior management unable to prioritize releases based on the value they contain.

In this talk, Cheryl Razzell (Global Head of Digital Platform Operations, Digital Platform, HSBC) and Sacha Labourey (CEO, CloudBees) will discuss the 5 key things organizations should consider as they work to connect their software development efforts to the rest of the business and allow the organization to achieve a harmonious state of "Continuous Everything."

Sacha was born in Neuchtel, Switzerland and graduated in 1999 from EPFL. It was during Sacha's studies at EPFL that he started his first consulting business - Cogito Informatique. In 2001, he joined Marc Fleury's JBoss project as a core contributor and implemented JBoss? original clustering features. In 2003, Sacha founded the European headquarters for JBoss and, as GM for Europe, led the strategy and partnerships that helped fuel the company's growth in that region. While in this position, he led the recruitment of some of JBoss? key talent and acquisition of key technology. In 2005, he was appointed CTO of JBoss, Inc. and oversaw all of JBoss engineering. In June 2006, JBoss, Inc. was acquired by Red Hat (NYSE:RHT). After the acquisition, Sacha remained JBoss CTO and played a crucial role in integrating and productizing JBoss software with Red Hat offerings. In 2007, Sacha became co-General Manager of Red Hat's middleware division. He ultimately left Red Hat and founded CloudBees in April 2010.

Cheryl has worked within many large organisations like the BBC, Apple, News international, Microsoft, HSBC. Over her career, she has undertaken many roles from Desktop support to project management and Global IT Director. Cheryl has more recently shifted her focus within her career in technology to move away from traditional IT and into the world of engineering where she has in her past 2 roles lead DevOps teams to build and support the CI/CD journeys for both Yammer and more recently for the past 2 years HSBC. In her current role at HSBC Cheryl has built a team and function globally from scratch to support the new Digital Platform for HSBC retail and wealth and banking consumer products. As an advocate for agile devolvement, she is working within the business to move away from monolithic development practices and to adopt a mircoservice and API environment. As well as supporting the on premise CI/CD platform, she is also in the process of building out a cloud-based platform that will allow growth with the use of automation and chatops.