Talking DevOps with Rosalind Radcliffe

I will be making the trip to Las Vegas in a few days to attend IBM InterConnect. One of the people I will have the pleasure of meeting and learning from is IBM’s Rosalind Radcliffe. She is a brilliant person with a passion for DevOps and helping customers.

I wrote this blog post based off of a conversation I had with Radcliffe last week:

IBM InterConnect is imminent. Next week more than 20,000 people will descend on Las Vegas and take over the north end of the strip for IBM’s massive event. One of the primary topics attendees will be focusing on is DevOps. IBM’s Rosalind Radcliffe—a respected evangelist for DevOps—will be there to share her passion and knowledge as well.

Rosalind Radcliffe is a Distinguished Engineer, in Rational currently responsible for the driving the System z and Power Systems aspects for the Jazz foundation and Jazz foundation based products—or so her LinkedIn profile indicates. Really she’s just a very smart person who loves to help customers solve problems.

At InterConnect Radcliffe will be talking about DevOps. She is hosting a number of workshops for DevOps for enterprise systems. She will also be engaging in panel discussions with clients to discuss things like how an organization can transform its current environment and the part that DevOps plays.

I had an opportunity to speak with Rosalind recently, and gain some insight into her perspective on DevOps and what it means for IBM enterprise customers. Two themes seemed to come up repeatedly: breaking down silos, and finding a common ground.

Radcliffe stressed that top-down support from executive management is crucial to a smooth transition. “At a business level [executives] understand DevOps is necessary. They know the value and they want to do it,” she explained. The challenge is how to adapt and make that transformation without disrupting business.

Where do you begin? If you’re Rosalind Radcliffe you start by finding common ground. All the way from the business perspective to deployment and across all platforms it’s important for all parties to see the same point of view and work toward a common goal.

That’s not always easy to do when you’re dealing with different teams using different tools and platforms, and with separate political agendas. The first step is breaking down silos. Rosalind told me, “Everyone says that, but that’s really what has to happen.”

Check out the post on DevOps.com for the rest of my conversation with Rosalind: Inside the mind of a true DevOps evangelist.