OpenShift Commons Briefing - Rage Against the Silos  with Kevin Behr

Kevin Behr has a lot of experience in the enterprise software development world. He’s CXO Advisor at the Global Transformation Office, Red Hat IBM, and Co-Author of "The Phoenix Project" and "Visible Ops."

At Red Hat, his focus is on helping businesses undertake the digital transformation. While that sounds buzzwordy, it’s still the shortest way to describe the psychological and cultural reconfiguration of all companies into software development firms, first, and product delivery and services rendering firms, second. 

That’s a tall order, and one of the ways a lot of companies have tried to address this problem has been with mixed team: tearing down silos and replacing them with cross-functional groups of business experts, programmers and analysts.

But is that the solution to every problem? Can cultural and transformational problems been addressed simply by taking the nerds and spreading them out across the organization like so many seeds? Or are there better ways of organizing, ones that can preserve the benefits of the silo'd work group, while still enabling every team to have access and communication to the software and IT teams they need to function.

Kevin’s got a whole new perspective on the traditional thinking of breaking up silos. In this week’s edition of Transformation Friday on OpenShift Commons, Kevin takes the time to explain a few ways of enacting transformation without whole-sale silo burning.

David Snowden and friends - Organizational Design Part 1

Eliyahu Goldratt - Standing on the shoulders of Giants

Elliot Jacques - In Praise of Hierarchy

Note - Kevin does not believe in innate talent levels and their limitations. Elliot is otherwise brilliant, in Kevin’s opinion. 

Don’t miss this Friday’s Commons event: Enterprise DevOps: From Silos to Services with Jeff Sussna.

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