What Matters in Dev and Ops — Mind the Daily Grind or Perish
I love playing with the latest and greatest tech. That’s why I became an industry analyst. There is nothing like looking at the latest deep learning prototype cutting 50% of the cost of an EC2 environment just by “playing Tetris” (I stole this analogy from the brilliant Andrew Hillier, but do not have any affiliation with Densify). I love seeing a demo of a new observability tool automatically mapping and tracking dependencies by watching live function calls, or thinking about the implications of solving today’s biggest compliance challenges by moving to a completely codified approach of IT operations and software release management. I could go on for hours…
However, when reality hits and you talk to actual enterprise IT guys, developers, architects, DevOps engineers, and so on, you quickly realize that they will patiently listen to these stories‒then take you back to their daily grind, where they simply cannot see a path toward this promised land of machine learning and deep learning-driven DevOps that comes with fully automatic observability and built-in compliance guardrails.
Leading the Way Out of the Daily Grind
This is a snapshot of the daily grind within corporate IT.
These are all the areas where IT operators struggle today. By simply aggregating the number of questions and the number of searches/views for a specific IT topic (based on the last 100 submissions to the ServerOverflow support forum), we can immediately visualize their daily grind. Even the most innovative new software platform that is light years ahead of its time needs to start there and show a clear and credible path out of this daily grind toward the happy state of having adopted the new platform.
Many Tragedies Play Out Along the Way
Not focusing on or oversimplifying the daily grind has led to the failure of large numbers of very promising startups. This widespread habit wiped out entire market segments. Some of them were revived years later after the core lessons were learned. The following chart is based on Crunchbase data and shows how failed startups and new startups compare across the Top 25 most popular categories.
Moral of the Story: Always Connect the Dots Between the Daily Grind and Disruptive Technologies
I wrote down this quick story as a reminder to myself of what happens when you do all the right things when planning and developing your product, but do not sufficiently focus on connecting this product to the daily lives of your target personas. As an industry analyst, it is also hard to escape this dilemma as I turn every stone to find new and potentially life-changing technologies. Then I sometimes spend much more time on figuring out whether or not the new “Holy Grail” product is designed and positioned in a way that solidly connects to the daily lives of the guys who do the work. I create charts like this to remind myself of the nitty gritty details of each of their daily task categories. From there, I try to connect the dots to the jaw-dropping product demo I just received.
