Margo Cronin from Zurich Insurance presents at DevOps Enterprise Summit in London 2016 about DevOps for Enterprises.

Margo spoke on the challenges large regulated global enterprises face when implementing DevOps and the impact of behavior change on transformational change.

There is a lot of information about DevOps, the technology, the culture, the behaviour. There is not, to be honest, a lot of information about tackling DevOps in large enterprises and there is certainly very little about tackling DevOps in large financial organizations.

This presentation will talk about lessons learnt rolling out DevOps in a large insurance organization. What are the characteristics of these organizations? They are very different to Facebook, Twitter, IT product companies and start ups. They are large, they typically have an "old brand" and maybe resistant to change, they outsource sometimes both Dev and Ops and sometimes to many different providers, they are global and built on a matrix structure of many business units and segments, they often are running application consolidation programs, they frequently are resistant to cloud based technologies, they are project rather than product driven with large project portfolios, they have stringent but maybe ineffective governance models. When approaching DevOps in this style of organisation Margo like to use the mantra "Respect the Monolith" - where the Monolith is not just the legacy IT systems but also some of the above challenges. Underestimating these challenges will be the downfall of a DevOps initiative.

Margo covers a "successful" DevOps initiative that she set up for the organization and show how it "failed". She covers how security, suppliers and regulation impacted them. This is a great presentation for anyone about to embark on a DevOps journey in a large disparate organization.

Monolith: a large, impersonal, political, corporate or social structure regarded as indivisible and slow to change.

Key Lessons:

Avoid creating DevOps in a vacuum.

Identify the monoliths of your organization to enable behavior change

Transformational change requires behavior change.