Even for traditional enterprises, the name of the game is now Business Agility and getting ideas to market faster than the other guy. This places significant challenges on traditional models for delivering IT, especially in a very large IT organization such as Target Technology Services (TTS). At Target, there is increasing momentum on pursuing a DevOps culture and mindset as an approach to solve for these challenges. In this talk, we will share how Target has been approaching this journey.

We’ll start with the early days, where Heather was an early innovator pushing for many of these concepts within her organization leading an effort to build an API Platform and APIs across all business domains in 2012. The Enterprise Services team knew they needed to embrace DevOps to enable speed, scalability, and resiliency to keep up with the rate of change in the digital retail space. The team has been a change agent and early adopter for re-thinking how Target does technology work from cultural aspects to technology toolchains as well as delivery methodologies.

In 2013 Target’s automation focus was significantly increased to meet the business case for speed, quality and cost of IT service delivery. This caused many groups across TTS to start looking at different ways to increase their automation maturity. Ross formed an Infrastructure Automation team to focus on building a deeper Automation / Infrastructure as Code competency within Ops, began testing and learning new approaches, and advocating a DevOps culture and mindset. This also started to increase the conversations around DevOps, but it was clear that there were some common misconceptions around what DevOps is that was becoming a barrier to its adoption at Target.

It was at this point that Ross and Heather decided to come together as a Dev leader and Ops leaders passionate about driving this change at Target. We’re now at the most exciting part of our journey; building a common understanding on DevOps, connecting/engaging passionate team members, and empowering people to share their learnings across the organization. We’ll discuss approaches we’ve followed to collaborate across traditional organizational boundaries and build momentum around this movement at Target. While we’re still on this journey, the future is extremely bright.