SRE and Organizational Transformation: Lessons from Activist Organizers

In the software industry’s recent past, the biggest disruptive wave was Agile methodologies. While Site Reliability Engineering is still early in its adoption, those of us who experienced the disruptive transformation of Agile see the writing on the wall: SRE will impact everyone.

Any kind of major transformation like this requires a change in culture, which is a catch-all term for changing people’s principles and behaviors. As your organization grows, this will extend beyond product and engineering. At some point you also need to convince the key power-holders in your organization to invest in this transformation.

Agile Transformation Leadership: Insight from Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley

Earlier in 2018, Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley spoke with Jeff Dalton, host of the AgileCxO “Agile Leadership Podcast,” about Compuware’s Agile transformation from a company “dominated by maintenance…Waterfall thinking” to a DevOps-enabled enterprise delivering innovation every 90 days.

“We embarked on an aggressive journey to remake ourselves first, adopt things like Agile and DevOps, and then become an innovative force in remaking the mainframe. And the fate of the company has changed as a result of it,” Chris said.