Mik Kersten, CEO and Founder of TaskTop, has an interesting story to tell. While most DevOps initiatives are built around the idea of toolchain automation and cultural transformation, Kersten wants you to think deeper than that. He wants you to be able to create a value stream, giving you the ability to determine the real business value of your DevOps initiatives. In this Innovator’s Journey to DevOps, we talk with Mik about his path to DevOps, his current projects and what he hopes to accomplish in the coming year.

Rosalind Radcliffe is a Distinguished Engineer at IBM and Chief Architect for DevOps in Enterprise Systems. I spoke with her at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in San Francisco, where we talked about her interest in technology as a child, what she has been working on at IBM and what she hope to accomplish in the next year.

Courtney Kissler considers communication, information sharing and a passion for project measurement visibility as critical to any DevOps transformation. Her path to DevOps began on a whim, when she switched degrees from accounting to computer science while at Eastern Washington University.

After working at a few startups in Seattle, Courtney began working at Nordstroms, staying for 14 years, holding multiple roles in the retail technology division. Early in 2016, she moved on to Starbucks, where she is now the Vice President of Retail Technology.

In this Innovator’s Journey to DevOps, I talk with Courtney about the beginnings of her career in technology, her introduction to the transformative processes of DevOps, and how working with the DevOps community has allowed her to implement those ideas at enterprise scale.

About Courtney Kissler

Courtney is the Vice President of Retail Technology at Starbucks. She’s accountable for the global POS and retail store technology experiences.

Prior to Starbucks, Courtney spent 14 years at Nordstrom with her last role being the Vice President of E-Commerce and Store technologies where she drove a technological transformation essential for outpacing the demands of today’s Omnichannel consumers. She was accountable for program management, delivery, and support for all customer facing technologies including in-store, Web, and mobile touch points.

Courtney joined Nordstrom as a security engineer in 2002 and held a variety of leadership roles across the technology organization. Courtney is a graduate of Eastern Washington University with a B.S. in Computer Information Systems and worked at two startups, CyberSafe and WorldStream Communications, prior to joining Nordstrom.

Tina Donbeck’s journey to DevOps began in a unique way, not through technology but through a degree in psychology. Her perception of DevOps is through the lens of change management. Her focus is not on the technical as much as cultural change and the customer perspective. In this Innovator’s Journey profile, Tina talks about her transition from psychology to DevOps, roadblocks to DevOps adoption and the influences shaping her work.

About Tina Donbeck

Tina has been an IT strategist and innovator for over 14 years in both the private and public sector. Her calling has been turning around failed projects or taking on difficult change initiatives and making them a success. Her recent endeavors have been with automating the development/release pipeline at her agency while promoting the cultural goodness of DevOps and Continuous Delivery methodologies. She credits her ability to rifle through chaos and perform extreme multi-tasking with her time spent as an active duty Marine and her current role as a Mom to two rambunctious boys.

Tina stood up and led the Enterprise Transformation Branch for the Navy CIO as well has served in various roles as Analyst/Program/Project Manager within DoD and now as a Director of IT at her agency. She is a Certified CIO,PMP, ScrumMaster, and Product Owner who currently is utilizing a ScrumBan approach in her project efforts.

“Competition used to be based upon physical and mechanical things. It's all of a sudden being based upon software, firmware, the ability to make things happen.” – Gary Gruver

Gary Gruver’s passion is transformation of IT in large enterprises. When I say large, that means working with companies such as HP and Macys to transform their software supply chain through automation and cultural change. In his book, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale, he lays out what it takes from an organizational level to make long term, meaningful changes within DevOps inspired organizations.

In this Innovator’s Journey, I talk with Gary about his path to discovery of DevOps, how his vision compares to others in the field and what he hopes to accomplish through his work with large organizations.

J. Paul Reed has over fifteen years experience in build engineering, release management, software configuration management, and process design, with a focus on discovering business requirements and integrating those needs to get products shipped faster and more reliably.

In this Innovator's Journey, we talk with Paul about how he got started, his work within the DevOps community and what he hopes to leave as his legacy.

Brandon Holcomb is worried about scaling IT projects at large enterprises. As head of infrastructure at Equifax, and previously at Home Depot, Holcomb has led large, transformational projects while concentrating on the ability of the new systems to scale. He has discovered that most issues are created by lack of communication between teams.

In this “Innovator’s Journey to DevOps”, we talk with Brandon about the interpersonal side of DevOps, his focus on leading with integrity and what he hopes to leave as his legacy.