Information Technology

One thing is for sure: we cannot "greenfield" human beings the way we can tear down an application and rebuild it in another environment. We can’t theorize about spherical cultures in a vacuum to simplify our equations. We see this every day in society; the residual effects of cultural change writ large in our day-to-day lives. The Civil Rights movement in the United States didn’t wipe out the previous culture and start over; there are still people whose opinions about such things are "from another era."

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People come with baggage: preconceived notions, past experiences, prejudices. When these individual characteristics are at odds with the culture that we want to foster in our organizations, we create stress. Alleviating that stress means either changing the person or changing the organization they belong to.

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Changing the values of our organization is a challenging task, one that has been under study by management scholars for decades. There are numerous interesting case studies about disastrous cultural change initiatives, failed cultural integrations from mergers, and investigations into what makes cultures change. We are not alone in our struggles to better serve our businesses by improving our work cultures and processes. Searching on the Harvard Business Review website for "cultural change" will get you 60+ publications going back nearly 30 years.

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One recent anecdote that I found particularly interesting was buried in a story from The Atlantic about recent trends in repatriating manufacturing work to the United States after years of moving those tasks abroad for labor cost savings.

The story of GE’s GeoSpring water heater is fascinating, regardless of the underlying drama of globalization and outsourcing. The product was designed in the U.S. and the specifications were sent to Asia for production; the manufacturing process became a black box that the design team sent instructions to. When looking at how to manufacture this particular product in the U.S., they brought together "design engineers,…but also manufacturing engineers, line workers, staff from marketing and sales" to discuss how best to build it, and discovered the design was "terrible" and no one actually wanted to try to build it.

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It sounds like Development wrote some code and "threw it over the wall" to Operations to figure out, doesn’t it?

GE’s integrated team sat down and redesigned the product with input from everyone, and ended up building a better product, at lower cost. It’s what we want for our technology products too, the ability to best serve the business and create value. The cultural shift is acknowledging that everyone has valuable input and communicates. This was a DevOps cultural shift. It is a change in the value of some new behaviours versus the old ones.