I had the good fortune to attend Devopsdays Goteborg a few weeks back, and met a whole bunch of wonderful people. Many thanks to the legendary, words-cannot-do-this-man-justice Patrick Debois and the other organisers.

Whilst there seemed to be a lots of fantastic, enlightening conversation around the devops space, there also seemed to be a lot of complaints about lack of sponsorship for devops from those people in “the business”. I took my usual subtle, sensitive approach to a perceived problem and proposed an exploratory openspace entitled “F**k devops, noone cares, where’s my money?”. Whilst I undermined myself somewhat by turning up late for my own openspace, my ideas didn’t seem to get a huge amount of traction.

“The business case for devops” (very faint on the board)

This was probably because there was a tools-orientated openspace happening in another room.

Devops’s achilles heel is the potential it has for being introspective(ignore the ITIL/process arguments; absolute nonsense) and purely tooling focused. Changing the THEM and US attitude from dev vs ops to devops vs THE MANAGEMENT just shifts the issue. Patrick Debois brilliantly summarises that we should, instead, be thinking about *dev*ops*; unfortunately some of the devops people I’ve met seem to be more interested in teaming up against others than including them.

I’m taking a look at how I think we can address this problem, by perhaps changing the focus from “delivering” to “delivering value”. Coming from a devops background, I’m obviously going to create a tool to help me. That should teach those management types a lesson.