This week is the draft for the National Football League (NFL), the professional sports equivalent to job hunting for college football players. Over several days, young student-athletes await their fate of being chosen by one of 32 NFL teams for the chance to make millions, play on national television, and win the Super Bowl. All of their anxieties and excitements are caught on camera too, which makes for one interesting job fair.
All of these events are a culmination of a yearlong draft process, which starts the prior season and moves into February with an event known as the Combine. The pre-draft event offers NFL franchises the opportunity to grade prospective players, judging them on their throwing, jumping, and running abilities. As you can imagine, selecting the right player, superstar or not, is a difficult process. Leadership must do their due diligence, ensure culture fit, and decide whether the athlete they intend on choosing will make a positive impact on the future of the franchise. Does this sound similar to your organization’s journey to selecting a DevOps solution? That’s because the two worlds are similar in more ways than not.
Here are some examples of questions both parties might ask when considering a critical addition to their team:
- What can the asset do now, as opposed to later? In sports, top draft picks are expected to perform immediately with team owners investing millions of dollars for anticipated value. In technology, the story is much the same since organizations invest with the intention of improving everything from processes to bottom-line revenue. For DevOps teams, such technologies must enable an engineering team to be more efficient and scalable, with the potential for automation.
- How does the asset guide us to the future? Not only do successful athletes bring success now, but team owners also anticipate longevity. Recently retired basketball player star Kobe Bryant was a constant for the Los Angeles Lakers for 20 years, and guided the team to five championships while entertaining fans for nearly a quarter century. For technology users, the comparison fits the same: How can implementing such a technology asset improve productivity, create innovation, and most importantly, offer the long-term stability that an organization needs to compete in a global market?
- Has the system been successful before? Professional sports operates in a system, and we’ve heard all the adages like “Offense wins games, defense wins championships”. Though the occasional team breaks through with an unorthodox system, history has shown that many of these philosophies don’t stick around for very long. In short, the fundamentals and processes are key to success, and much like in business and technology, leveraging key processes also leads to positive business outcomes. While cloud computing in itself is very new, the paradigms surrounding agile development and thoughtful planning have been around for eons.
With the first pick of the 2016 refresh, your company selects…
As you consider your organization’s DevOps strategy for 2016 and beyond, it’s important to look at what’s on your draft board. There are numerous solutions on the market, but not all are proven commodities. Among the ones you should take a look at include Bluemix, the hybrid cloud solution from IBM that shortens time to value through scalable, integrated, and automated solutions. Much like professional sports where leagues change by the week, Bluemix offers enterprise organizations the right tools to remain agile in dynamic industry environments. With support for all modern web programming languages, cloud development has never been easier.
The infographic below dives into deeper detail on how Bluemix’s impact.
Let us know how you’re selecting the appropriate cloud solutions in the comments section below!
