Beyond DevOps: User-Centered IT

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Jeff Sussna, Ingineering.IT Beyond DevOps: User-
April 15, 2012 Centered IT

About Me

25+ years in IT
 Software development
 QA
 System architecture
 IT tools and processes

IT Service Innovation consultant
 Help IT orgs increase quality efficiency and customer value
 Serve dev/design shops, startups, and and Fortune 500’s
 Do Service Design/BDD/QA & Ops Automation/Cloud Adoption

Copyright © 2012 Ingineering.IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Trends, Challenges, Strategies

#cloud

#CoIT

#coworking

#lean

#DevOps

#servicedesign


The Times They Are a-Changin'

Disruption coming to IT just like media and other industries

The villains
 Cloud Computing
 Consumerization of IT
 Changes in the nature of the workplace

IT no longer a scarce commodity
 Cost
 Availability
 Knowledge


Cloud Computing

Creates possibility (and expectation) for better faster cheaper
easier

Trades agility and flexibility for complexity
 Spin up servers on demand, only pay when running
 Manage graph of providers, calculate variable costs

Requires migration and retooling on multiple levels:
 Architecture
 Management tools
 Skills and processes


Consumerization of IT

Bring Your Own Device
 Business cell becomes family cell becomes Unix box with apps and
browser
 Personal, social, work activities blur together
 People expect access to everything, everywhere, all the time

Consumer Cloud Services
 Self-serve IT solutions - email, doc mgmt, backup…
 People get access to everything, everywhere, all the time


The Changing WorkPlace

Traditional “benevolent paternalistic” benefits eroding
 Pensions
 Health insurance

Work from home => work from coffee shop => coworking
 Bring your own desk, phone, network, computer…

Employee => freelancer

What is “internal” anymore anyway?


Internal IT and Cloud Merge

Cloud vendors provide IT, enterprises serve consumers
 Imagine a scenario where Yammer uses ADP and ADP uses
Yammer

Internal users become customers
 Customers have choice, knowledge, power
 “Shadow IT” is proof
 Don’t differentiate between internal and external services

IT’s role shifts from control to enablement
 Becomes a software services vendor
 PMO takes on product marketing function


Internal IT and Cloud Merge cont.

“Enterprise and consumer experiences are blurring more
everyday as applications move to the cloud and companies
build a vertical stack of offerings. Today's Facebook and Twitter
generation expect their applications to be as easy and
enjoyable to use as consumer applications. As the cloud
evolves, our design process must evolve with it.”

 Dave Knight, interaction designer living in San Francisco


Key Cloud Characteristics

Functionality + Operability
 We run it so you don’t have to
 We ensure availability, security, integrity…
 When we make updates you automatically get them
 This is marketing talking, not ops

Operational excellence is part of the product

Continuous improvement is part of the service

Cloud gives customer appetite for near-constant change


Cloud Expectations Imply Lean

Cloud reduces customer’s cost of change to near zero

Doesn’t necessarily reduce vendor’s cost

Lean: provide value efficiently when change and uncertainty are the norm
 Pull from customer (attunement not servitude)
 Maximize value flow
 Reduce waste
 Minimize Non-Value-Added activities
 Continuous improvement

Greatest value is giving customer what they want, when & how they want it

Greatest waste is giving customer something they don’t want or need


Agile is Lean

Value working code over artifacts

User feedback early and often

Shrink cycle times
 Large, long lead-time delivery units add complexity
 Introduce waste
 Reduce quality

Organize around collaboration and attunement to users

Continuous (“frictionless”) delivery is the holy grail


Cloud Implies DevOps

DevOps = Functionality + operability

Leanness has to cross dev/ops blood/brain barrier
 Inter-org handoffs introduce waste
 Ops needs to be more agile
 Cloud elasticity enables ops version of pull
 Ops automation minimizes NVA


DevOps

Leanness
 Short cycle times
 Minimized NVA
 Continuous improvement (DevOps leads to NoOps)

Collaboration
 Dev + QA + Ops
 Standups, Kanban, integrated teams

Unity of purpose
 Dev and QA care about operability
 Ops cares about functionality


DevOps is Necessary but not
Sufficient
What’s the key cloud characteristic again? Service

What is a service?
 “An experience with multiple touch-points occurring over time”
 An end-to-end customer journey
 May cross provider boundaries
 Customer judges provider by entirety of experience
 “Design digital services, not websites”

Leanness requires aligning everyone who serves the journey with
each other and with the customer
 Marketing and design
 Dev and QA
 Ops and Support


Services Need Service Design

Applies product design approaches to services
 Human-centered and co-creative
 Goal is desirability: utility + usability + satisfaction
 Design thinking: innovation through analysis + observation +
creativity

Shifts design from things to dynamic systems

Concerned with visible and invisible components:
 Waiting room
 Service bays


Service Design Techniques

Customer Journey Map
 Identify the sum of how the customer interacts with your service
 Think in terms of “jobs to be done”
 Identify gaps and opportunities for increased value

Service Blueprint
 Connect front-stage with back-stage

Expectation Map
 What’s important to the user? What makes them happy/mad?
 Websites that stay up during hurricanes make them happy
 Security breaches make them mad

These are guiding practices, not products in their own right


User-Centered IT

User-Centered IT = Functionality + Operability + Service Experience

Driven by the Customer Journey

Organized by the Service Blueprint

Addresses off-site touchpoints
 email, phone, chat, twitter
 For Netflix the USPS is (still) a touchpoint

Integrates Lean IT and Design Thinking
 User centricity
 Value optimization
 Continuous improvement
 Innovation through divergent thinking


The User-Centered IT Organization

Leanness

Collaboration

Unity of Purpose


Leanness

Everyone values working service over artifacts
 Remember valuing A over B doesn’t mean you don’t ever do B

Everyone strives to remove waste (esp. over-the-wall handoffs)

Everyone focuses on short cycle times and customer attunement

Everyone strives for continual improvement


Collaboration

Everyone in standups, integrated teams
 Culture and behavior, not necessarily org chart

Shared tools and techniques
 Kanban
 BDD

Everything on the kanban board
 Dev stories
 QA automation tasks
 Marketing and design tasks
 Ops automation tasks
 Release tasks
 Support tasks

Done means working for users & supportable by the business


Unity of Purpose –
Marketing/Design
Marketing cares about operability (remember, it’s part of what they’re
selling)

Functionality release
 1st-class citizen for customer relations and UX
 Primary place where customer’s cost of change is still non-zero

Outages and security breach communications are brand moments
like it or not

“Design for fail” applies to design not just tech

Help others appreciate brand/customer/journey

Integral part of service – always measuring selling educating


Unity of Purpose – Dev/QA

Operability impact of code and design decisions

Application support for monitoring and measurement

Validate elasticity, DR, security, A-B testing…

Validate functionality release process

QA merges with Ops through chaos monkeys


Unity of Purpose - Ops

Application-level monitoring – server’s up but does app work?

Business-level measurement
 Validated learning
 Variable cost visibility

Functionality release services – dark release, A-B testing, etc.

IaaS, PaaS, etc. – help dev/QA be more lean

Help others appreciate operational excellence
 Goal, not activity
 Proactive, customer-centric, not reactive


Unity of Purpose - Support

Support = customer facing and back-office

They are customers too

They are part of the service

They provide precious insight

They need application features and operational support

Support tools and processes need to be validated

It’s service quality, not software quality


Conclusion

Difference between public and private IT is dissolving
 Users expect everything, everywhere, all the time

Changes won’t happen overnight
 No answers, just challenges
 Take continuous improvement to heart

The key is to shift the discussion
 From “$#*! here comes cloud” to “how can we be more lean”
 From “how can we keep chaos at bay” to “how can we manage chaos
through resiliency”

Everyone needs to appreciate the entire customer journey

User-Centered IT = lean innovation across the entire service
organization


My Vitals

www.ingineering.it

blog.ingineering.it

www.linkedin.com/in/jeffsussna

@jeffsussna


Beyond DevOps: User-Centered IT

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