When IT Fails The Business Fails...

When IT Fails…
The Business Fails…
Gene Kim
Author, Visible Ops Handbook
ProKarma Seminar
August 20, 2012

Session ID:

@RealGeneKim, genek@realgenekim.me

Now, More Than Ever…
 Even in “low-tech industries,” 95% of all capital
projects have an IT component…
 50% of all capital spending is technology-related

Where we need to
be…
IT is always in the
way
(again…)
We are here…


Comparison Of Turnover For CEOs and
CFOs…
 When firms with IT-related material weaknesses are
compared with the other two groups, there are some
startling differences in executive turnover…
N=184 Material weakness Material weakness
“Clean” vs. (no IT related issues) (with IT related issues)
CEO 2.0x higher 8.0x higher*

CFO 1.7x higher 3.6x higher

CIO 2.2x higher 2.2x higher

* These firms also 2.6 less likely to be profitable than “clean” firms

Source: Forthcoming Paper: Richardson, Masli, Watson, Zmud, Sarbanes-Oxley Information Technology
Material Weaknesses And The Disciplining Of The CEO, CFO And CIO

There’s a hidden gas, that we can’t see, taste,
touch, smell, and it’s killing CEOs everywhere.

It’s called IT.

Or more precisely, unplanned work in IT.

6

it.fail() == business.fail()


Where Did The High Performers Come From?


Over Ten Years, We Benchmarked 1500+ IT
Orgs


High Performing IT Organizations
 High performers maintain a posture of compliance
 Fewest number of repeat audit findings
 One-third amount of audit preparation effort
 High performers find and fix security breaches faster
 5 times more likely to detect breaches by automated control
 5 times less likely to have breaches result in a loss event
 When high performers implement changes…
 14 times more changes
 One-half the change failure rate
 One-quarter the first fix failure rate
 10x faster MTTR for Sev 1 outages
 When high performers manage IT resources…
 One-third the amount of unplanned work
 8 times more projects and IT services
 6 times more applications
Source: IT Process Institute, 2008


Tough Love From Ari Balogh


The Downward Spiral
Operations Sees… Dev Sees…
 Too many fragile and insecure  More urgent, date-driven projects
applications in production put into the queue
 Too much time required to restore  Even more fragile code (less
service secure) put into production
 Too much firefighting and unplanned  More releases have increasingly
work “turbulent installs”
 Planned project work cannot complete  Release cycles lengthen to
amortize “cost of deployments”
 Frustrated customers leave
 Bigger deployment failures
 Market share goes down
 More time spent on firefighting
 Business misses Wall Street
commitments  Ever increasing backlog of work
that cold help the business win
 Business makes even larger promises
to Wall Street  Ever increasing amount of
tension between IT Ops,
Development, Design…

These aren’t ITSM or IT Operations problems…
These are business problems!

My Mission
 Chronicle the Hero’s Journey For IT ("When IT
Fails: A Business Novel”) so that everyone can
gain a shared understanding of how and why IT
fails, so they can fix it

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The State Of The Business


Project Phoenix


Day 1: Payroll Outage


Day 2: PMO Meeting


Day 3: The SOX-404 Audit Meeting


My Mission: Figure Out How Break The IT Core
Chronic Conflict

 Every IT organization is pressured to
simultaneously:
 Respond more quickly to urgent business needs
 Provide stable, secure and predictable IT service

Words often used to describe process improvement:
“hysterical, irrelevant, bureaucratic, bottleneck, difficult to understand, not
aligned with the business, immature, shrill, perpetually focused on irrelevant
technical minutiae…”

Source: The authors acknowledge Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt, creator of the Theory of Constraints and
author of The Goal, has written extensively on the theory and practice of identifying and resolving
core, chronic conflicts.
31

2007: Three Controls Predict 60% Of
Performance

 To what extent does an organization define,
monitor and enforce the following?
 Standardized configuration strategy
 Process discipline
 Controlled access to production systems

Source: IT Process Institute, 2008

Visible Ops: Playbook of High Performers

 The IT Process Institute has
been studying high-performing
organizations since 1999
 What is common to all the high
performers?
 What is different between them
and average and low
performers?
 How did they become great?
 Answers have been codified in
the Visible Ops Methodology

www.ITPI.org

Visible Ops Security: Linking Security and IT
Operations Objectives In 4 Practical Steps
Service Design & Management
Security Management Service Level Management Capacity Management
Availability & Contingency Service Reporting Financial Management
Management
Control Processes Phase 2
Asset & Configuration Management
Phase 3 Release Processes Change Management
Supplier Processes
Catch and
Establish Release Management
Resolution Processes Customer Relationship release, find
Incident Management Management
repeatable Problem Management Supplier Management fragile artifacts
build library Automation

Phase 1
Electrify fence,
Phase 4 modify first
Continually improve response

Sources: ITPI Visible Ops & IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) / BS 15000

Source: John Allspaw

The First Way:
Systems Thinking


The First Way:
Systems Thinking

(Business) (Customer)


The Second Way:
Amplify Feedback Loops


The Third Way:
Culture Of Continual Experimentation And
Learning


Good News: It Can Be Done

Bad News: You Can’t Do It Alone


Ops


QA And Test

Source: Flickr: vandyll

Development


Process And Controls


Product Management And Design

Source: Flickr: birdsandanchors

What Does Transformation Feel Like?

47

Find What’s Most Important First


Quickly Find What Is Different…


Before Something Bad Happens…


Find Risk Early…


Communicate It Effectively To Peers…


Hold People Accountable…


Based On Objective Evidence…


Answer Important Questions…


Recognize Compounding Technical Debt…


That Gets Worse…


And Fixing It…

Source: Pingdom

Have What We Need, When We Need It…


Big Things Get Done Quickly…


Ever Increasing Situational Mastery…


Help The Business Win…


With Support From Your Peers…


And Do More With Less Effort…


This Is An Important Problem
Operations Sees… Dev Sees…
 Fragile applications are prone to  More urgent, date-driven projects
failure put into the queue
 Long time required to figure out “which  Even more fragile code (less
bit got flipped” secure) put into production
 Detective control is a salesperson  More releases have increasingly
“turbulent installs”
 Too much time required to restore
service  Release cycles lengthen to
amortize “cost of deployments”
 Too much firefighting and unplanned
work  Failing bigger deployments more
difficult to diagnose
 Urgent security rework and
remediation  Most senior and constrained IT
ops resources have less time to
 Planned project work cannot complete fix underlying process problems
 Frustrated customers leave  Ever increasing backlog of work
 Market share goes down that cold help the business win
 Business misses Wall Street  Ever increasing amount of
commitments tension between IT Ops,
Development, Design…
 Business makes even larger promises
to Wall Street


66

When IT Fails: A Business Novel and
The DevOps Cookbook

 Coming in Winter 2012/2013

 “In the tradition of the best MBA case studies, this
book should be mandatory reading for business
and IT graduates alike.”
Paul Muller, VP Software Marketing, Hewlett-
Packard

Gene Kim, Tripwire founder,
 “The greatest IT management book of our
Visible Ops co-author generation.”
Branden Williams, CTO Marketing, RSA


When IT Fails: The Novel and The DevOps
Cookbook

 Our mission is to positively affect the
lives of 1 million IT workers by 2017

 If you would like the novel excerpts, “Top
10 Things You Needs To Know About
DevOps,” and updates on the book:

 Sign up at http://itrevolution.com
Gene Kim, Tripwire founder,
Visible Ops co-author  Email genek@realgenekim.me
 Hand me a business card


If you’d like the slides from today’s
presentation…

 Text your first name, email
address and “68383” to:
+1 (858) 598-3980

 Or visit:
http://www.instantcustomer.c
om/go/68383

 Or scan this QR Code:

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Editor's Notes