Sasha Czarkowski (Rosenbaum)

In today’s tech environment, both people and organizations must continuously learn and adapt to be successful. Yet study after study shows that learning is difficult for most organizations.

In this talk, we will discuss what’s preventing smart people from learning new things, the development of personal and organizational growth mindset, and how leading by example proves to be extremely important for creating a learning organization.

In todays tech environment, both people and organizations must continuously learn and adapt to be successful. Yet study after study shows that learning is difficult for most organizations.

In this talk, we will discuss whats preventing smart people from learning new things, the development of personal and organizational growth mindset, and how leading by example proves to be extremely important for creating a learning organization.

Its been 2 years since Large Language Models became a household name, and every company on the planet is expecting to see significant productivity
gains across multiple departments from using genAI-powered tools.

Yet, emerging research tells us that naively utilizing genAI can hurt the organizational productivity as much as it helps it.

This shouldnt come as a surprise as we have seen similar results with companies naively implementing novel technologies and methodologies before. We know how to do these things well, yet we keep falling into the trap of assuming that technology alone solves the problem and fail to account for the human factors of sociotechnical systems.

We also tend to believe that novel systems require novel governance and processes, causing us to solve and re-solve the same problems over and over again.

In this talk, we will cover some of the common causes of productivity loss via naive adoption of genAI tools, and how to take the human factors into account to intelligently design the sociotechnical systems to maximize genAI-powered productivity gains.

The term DevOps first appeared in 2009, and since then has been used to describe a cultural shift, an engineering job title, and many products in the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery space.

In this session, we will talk through the brief history of DevOps as a methodology, a set of technical skills, and an umbrella of technologies, and then dive into what the next 5 to 10 years are likely to look like in the DevOps space.

In the past decade, most organizations have invested in DevOps, and by now many of those efforts have failed to meet expectations of the executive sponsors. Organizations have brought in the latest and greatest tools and often sped up their development process without seeing a clear benefit. Some invested in culture only to see collaboration wane and any progress stall. The DevOps pendulum swings between focus on technology and culture. The buzzwords, rituals and tools keep changing, but the results often seem to worsen over time.

Optimizing any one part of a system is often suboptimal for the whole system. The goal should never be to adopt but to adapt to the opportunities and challenges of our organizations, but what are those? This talk will give attendees a framework to analyze the flow of work through their unique sociotechnical system, to understand the specific flow of value and propose metrics to identify and prioritize iterative improvements. The presentation will be technology agnostic but will focus on mapping capabilities that appropriate technical tools and skills should achieve together.

Almost all software offered by our organizations, internal or external, ran by tech companies or big enterprises is increasingly offered as Software as a Service. Offering SaaS requires a new mode of operation from IT departments, yet most companies continue to run IT the same way they have 20 years ago, wondering why incidents are rampant and tech staff is burnt out.

In this talk, we will discuss the 3 unfunded mandates of moving to SaaS software - the unfunded tech debt remediation, the unfunded operational burden reduction, and the unfunded platform engineering. We will talk through why those are crucial concerns for running SaaS successfully, why we find ourselves making the same mistakes over and over, why it is so difficult to sell your CFO on investing in the unfunded mandates, and how we can improve the situation.