If everything was going great, you probably wouldn't be taking this course, most of us have experience working for organizations that struggle, to deliver dependable software, quickly. We've grown accustomed to long hours, and late nights, doing everything in our power to achieve success, even when it seems like we're fighting against others in our own organization. In this video, we'll dive into these issues, specifically, the core chronic conflict, that often results from organizational silos. How this drama plays out, across all types of organizations, in the costs, human, and economic, that result. [MUSIC] What we're about to discuss, is not unique to technology companies, IT is intertwined with every organization today. It's difficult to imagine a significant project in any organization, that does not require at least one IT change. From a business perspective, projects are how organizations change, and stay relevant, in a rapidly evolving environment. In fact, 50% of capital spending, is now technology related, even in industries, that have historically the lowest spending on technology. Effective IT management is far more critical to success, than many business leaders realize. According to one study, corporations with material weaknesses related to IT deficiencies, experienced eight times higher CEO turnover than corporations with no material weaknesses. Creating or maintaining a competitive advantage today, requires a fast time to market, reliable service, and constant experimentation. Unfortunately, many organizations operate with characteristics shown at the left of this slide, requiring months to bring new features to market, and only after suffering through painful deployments. Heroic individual and team efforts, are routinely required, in order to maintain existing services, and to provide new services to customers. This characterization is far from the ideal, a lead time measured in hours, with routine deployments occurring on demand, as new features are ready. We'll talk more about how to achieve this ideal in a future video, after we unpack the underlying cause, that too often sets us up for failure. Unfortunately, most IT organizations, have an inherent conflict between development and operations, because these two groups have conflicting goals. Development, must respond rapidly to changes in the competitive environment, operations must provide dependable and secure service to customers. When these two goals are carried out in organizational silos, the result is core chronic conflict, that increases lead time and decreases the frequency of deployments. Worse, it prevents realizing the organisation's overarching goal, which is the fast flow of work, into production, while ensuring dependability and security. Let's look at how this chronic conflict, leads to a downward spiral, this illustration represents the major players in the drama. The blue gear, at the top represents the business, executives, or product managers, the red gear at the left, represents development, the group responsible for delivering new features. The yellow gear at the bottom, represents IT operations, which is responsible for providing dependable and secure service to customers. Finally, the light blue fly wheel on the right, represents customers. We expect to see this machine operating smoothly, revenue from customers allows business leaders to invest in new capabilities, that are delivered by software developers and IT operators. Unfortunately, reality often differs, from this ideal, the first act in our drama, starts in IT operations, where many applications are complex and fragile. Ward Cunningham coined the term technical debt, to characterize the compromises we make regularly. Not properly documenting a feature, an extra configuration option to support a particular operating system. And a database change, made several months ago, so that developers could work correctly, in the production environment. Like financial debt, technical debt accrues interest, forget about any one of these prior issues, which would be trivial by itself. And we experience a failure, such as a major revenue generating system, that is no longer available to our customers. The second act begins, when a business leader attempts to compensate for the prior failure, a product manager might promise a new feature, or an executive might announce a larger revenue target. Unfortunately, this promise isn't made in consultation with development and IT operations, but the business leader still commits these groups to deliver upon it. Software developers rushed to complete another urgent project, cutting corners to meet the release date, with an expectation to decrease this new technical debt, when there's time. Yet, as we're all too familiar, there's rarely an opportunity to resolve these new issues, even though the system increasingly relies upon them. Instead, our critical systems become more difficult to change, more fragile. In the third act, everything is just a little more difficult, IT operations requires a little more time for deployments. And may interrupt developers, ongoing work, to compensate for missing documentation, or missing schema migration for a database. Everyone is busier, and work queues get longer, as more coordination is required, even for small changes. As the cycle continues, we become fearful, and less tolerant of changes, because even minor changes, can lead to major failures. Managers attempt to wrest control through change approval boards that sap attention from our real work, it's as if we're throwing sand into the gears. Sure, a little is tolerable even if it isn't good, but the cumulative effect is this process repeats, ultimately spells disaster. If we pause for a moment, the downward spiral is obvious, deployments take longer, from a couple of hours to entire weekends. Worse, they involve customer facing outages, with firefighting and heroics that leave everyone exhausted. Product delivery cycles stretch, even as projects become less ambitious, feedback is slower, particularly from customers. The disconnect between development and IT operations, means that developers have long forgotten about a feature, by the time that they hear about issues when that feature is deployed into production. Business leaders, must wait months, to know if projects address customers demands, as we're no longer able to change rapidly, in an evolving market, we lose market share to our competitors. This downward spiral has very real costs, not only to the organization as a whole, but also to individuals. Burnout is a particular type of work related stress, they can make the things that we once loved seem insignificance. The physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion, can lead to a reduced sense of accomplishment, cynicism, feelings of helplessness, and loss of personal identity. Burnout is often correlated, with pathological, or power oriented, organizational cultures, and unproductive wasteful work. Stressful jobs can be as bad for physical health, as obesity, and secondhand smoke. Burnout decreases individuals quality of life, not only for employees, but also for their family and friends. When most severe, burnouts can lead to family issues, clinical depression, and even suicide. We shouldn't be surprised, when the best people choose to leave their jobs when they experience burnouts. Excessive job turnover contributes to the $300 billion lost each year, due to work related stress. In addition, there is an enormous opportunity cost associated with all the unproductive work, undertaken by organizations caught in the downward spiral. IDC and Gartner estimate that 5% of the worldwide gross domestic product was spent on IT, including hardware, services, and telecommunications, in 2011. If 50%, of that $3.1 trillion, was spent to operate, and maintain existing systems, and one third of that 50%, was spent on urgent and unplanned work, then more than $500 billion was wasted. If DevSecOps enables us to halve that waste,and apply those resources to other endeavours, it could create $2.6 trillion in value, according to Jean Kim and his colleagues. [SOUND]
