Interviews

Interview: Daily Deliveries at SAP

Delivery of Things World team and Dirk Lehmann had a chat to discuss the impact of the DevOps prior to his talk at the event this April.

Delivery of Things World: There has been growing buzz about DevOps. What is DevOps and how can it best be deployed in the enterprise?
Dirk Lehmann: To apply DevOps at a large traditional enterprise, the enterprise must change its organization and culture. We need small, autonomous, empowered and cross-functional teams. We need to put trust over control and decentralization over central control.

Delivery of Things World: Do you see DevOps as a technical movement at SAP?
Dirk Lehmann: At a first glance, it looks like a technical movement, as it’s driven by people from technology. When approaching the DevOps patterns, it’s soon clear that the required changes are mostly non-technical.

Delivery of Things World: How did you achieve great scalability of DevOps within SAP?
Dirk Lehmann: We train teams on and off the job, and we give them time to adopt as you cannot change a 43 year old company culture in a day.

Delivery of Things World: How can organisations encourage a broader use of skills?
Dirk Lehmann: You need to empower people and establish a failure tolerant culture.

Delivery of Things World: Shout-outs: Any sites/people/articles or books that have inspired you lately?
Dirk Lehmann: The practice of cloud system administration – By Limoncelli, Chalup, Hogan – Available here

The Delivery of Things World team thanks Dirk Lehmann for his insights!
About Dirk Lehmann: Dirk is a frequent speaker at conferences and a true DevOps evangelist. He consults teams within SAP on their way to high frequent software deliveries and helps them to implement DevOps principles.

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