How are you rewarding top performers in digital transformation, data science, agile, and devops programs?

Are you leaving it to HR and once a year performance reviews as your primary way to recognize good performance? Or are you seeking formal and informal ways to let your key employees know they are a good job.

Recognition can come in many forms. For example, it's been a great couple of weeks for me on receiving recognition. Enterprise Mobility Exchange listed me as their top digital transformation expert on Twitter along with Sarbjeet Johal, Evan Kirstel, and Tamara McCleary. Earlier in the week, Thinkers360 listed me in their top 20 global thought leaders in big data along with experts Sandeep Raut, Daniel Newman, Tripp Braden, and others.

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How BigPanda’s “Open Box Machine Learning” enables Autonomous Digital Operations

Are you tired of all the bridge calls, all-hands-on-deck meetings, and operational “war rooms” to manage and resolve the latest outage that’s impacting customers and business users?

Are you frustrated by the endless list of tickets that were generated from different monitoring tools like Nagios, CloudFront, Splunk, Datadog, and others around the same incident?

As applications are now hyper-connected to APIs, microservices, and multiple data sources, do you need better tools to diagnose the root cause of issues faster and more easily? 

These are some of the frustrations of IT Operations and NOC teams that must respond to operational incidents from a growing number of production applications that were newly launched via digital transformation programs, on top of any number of legacy applications that are still business critical. And this is while businesses are demanding more uptime and higher levels of performance because technology has become strategically critical to a larger number of businesses. 

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5 Driving Digital Predictions for 2019

With Thanksgiving behind us and the new year approaching, it's time to take stock on where we collectively are in our various transformational journeys.

You'll see that I have a mixed message in my predictions. While some technologies and transformation programs will see increases in 2019, there will be strong culture and financial headwinds that will challenge CIO, CDO, CEO, Boards and leaders to defend their investments.

Let's look at some numbers that are top of mind as I make these predictions.

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Improving Customer Experience by Automating Incident Response

The tools and practices of IT Operations have to get better and easier.

Every IT Ops engineer has the job of responding to alerts when a website is down or unresponsive. To restore service, the engineer follows a certain procedure to restart the web server and validate that the website is operational. Maybe it happens again a few days later and another engineer repeats the procedure to restore service. If it happens yet again, a proactive engineer hopefully takes the initiative to develop a simple script that automates this procedure.

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Five Ways to Justify your DevOps Investment

Nothing in life and business is free. In the case of DevOps, you'll have to invest in new practices, technologies and culture change in order to get the benefits.

For some of you working in traditional organizations, this may require you to justify the investment - maybe not in financial terms - but in clear delivery, operational excellence, and other KPIs that are meaningful to the business.

To do this well - and win a leader's support on a DevOps transformation program - you'll need to better understand some of the pain points they are feeling and opportunities they want to hit. That's a step down the road beyond just how IT can do a better job with DevOps. Remember, you'll need an investment.

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Your Features are too BIG! Defining Epics, Features, and Stories in Agile Development

How you define a feature impacts your agile mindset and may impact the culture and collaboration you are trying to achieve.

Following up from my recent article on InfoWorld on 5 tips on configuring Jira for multiple teams, I thought to describe some of the antipatterns in defining features and some best practices.

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Want to change the culture? Start with your front line support teams!

Imagine your customer is having a small crisis. In my case, I was on a flight that went through repeated delays; first when the aircraft needed maintenance at the gate, then when the pilot aborted the takeoff, and then a third time when the airline finally had us switch planes. All told, my flight was four hours delayed. It wasn't a crisis for me, but it was for some passengers that were more nerved by the aborted flight.

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