In many ways, the breakthroughs that have shaped the last few decades of progress in software delivery have become normal. We are no longer facing an intellectual gap in what “good” looks like on a software delivery team. DevOps has a Handbook, SRE has a Workbook, and Agile is even taught by PMI. We have an understanding of the core practices needed for teams to deliver software and a broad acceptance of their principles, tools and benefits.
While we will continue to see refinements, specializations, and new additions to our repertoire, our ability to leverage advances to solve very large problems depends on something far greater and more pressing: developing the leadership and organizational acumen to manage the complexity of integrating and adapting techniques, practices and technologies into different contexts at scale.
As a sign of the times, take the recent renaming of the premier technology conference, the DevOps Enterprise Summit, which will now be called the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit, along with the accompanying Journal. This is a community that has long showcased the most thought provoking topics from high-performance technology leaders, the people who gave us game-changers like The Phoenix Project, Accelerate, Project to Product, Team Topologies, and, most recently, Flow Engineering. The name change is not a shift in strategy, it is a recognition of a fundamental reality: the core challenge of large-scale software has always been understanding how to manage the complexity of social-technical systems.
This is a difficult problem, requiring leaders to not only become experts in a variety of practices and technologies, but also to harness the organizational systems and behaviors required to adapt and integrate them into a particular organization, to fit their specific needs, culture, and scale. Factors such as organizational design, system architecture, legacy technology, regulatory requirements, market forces and much more will all influence how we go about implementing and achieving the goals of our ways of working.
While it is necessary to keep applying, refining and evolving individual practices, it is not sufficient. Organizational proficiency in enterprise technology management lies in leaders with a mastery of how to execute techniques like dynamic learning, flow systems, complexity science, transformational leadership, and much more. It involves understanding how to leverage the qualities and characteristics of socio-technical systems to capitalize on their form and capabilities, creating environments that enable progressive thinking to thrive.
And, of course, it means adopting new technologies to support our ways of working, most significantly Generative AI. Without a doubt, Gen AI is going to radically alter how we approach problem-solving in organizations. It is already producing a surge in creative thinking about how we engage with our systems as people explore different ways to leverage AI capabilities, learning how to build things better by augmenting our human abilities.
Interestingly, the challenge of deploying Generative AI for productivity is much akin to the problem of deploying DevOps or Agile. On the one hand, it requires learning the ‘where, when, how, and why’ of the phenomena, but on the other hand, and equally important, it involves the same core element described above: the ability for leaders to understand and execute on the ‘fundamentals’ of socio-technical leadership, to build organizations that are dynamically evolving and adapting to the possibilities presented by a new phenomenon. That is why ideas like those found at the Enterprise Leadership Summit are so valuable – we find the same keys to success needed to deploy any new critical, game-changing capability.
Today, we are at the “What is this?” phase of Gen AI, as we were with Agile twenty-something years ago and DevOps just ten. This will undoubtedly be an area of intense growth and significant opportunity for us all, and it would appear we are moving much faster into the scaling and integration phase of the problem. It is these topics and more that will be discussed at the upcoming Enterprise Leadership Summit in August, where I have the honour to be presenting alongside many esteemed guests. Hope to see you there!
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