Improving operations
“Operations is the broader supply chain – everything you do to get from raw materials to happy customers.”
―Damon Edwards
Looking at the past 30 years, new discoveries might seem like disconnected innovations, but it’s really about people continuously figuring out how to make operations more efficient.
Damon Edwards points out that operations is the competitive advantage for organizations. To make it more efficient and use it to their advantage, people have removed waste and inefficiencies.
At first, we were in the webscale era, figuring out how to operate workloads at a large scale. After that, in the DevOps era, it was all about achieving speed and moving as fast as the business. Currently, we’re in the AI era, using AI to automate expert tasks and reduce coordination costs.
Looking in hindsight, for the last 30 years, we’ve been witnessing one huge Theory of Constraints exercise of identifying and removing bottlenecks in operations.
Listen to my conversation with Damon—it’s as much a history lesson as it is a primer for operating in the future.
Interview of the Month
Improving operations with Damon Edwards
I’ve been aware of Damon’s impressive work in the DevOps space since my first Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit where Damon is continuously a member of the program committee. But, in the last couple of years, we’ve gotten to know each other better and engaged in some super interesting conversations and topics that I wanted to share with you. This time, we talked about the timeless topic of providing value and whether operations, in the broader sense, can be a competitive differentiator for a company.
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Quote of the day
“An idiot admires complexity”
―Terry Davis, Creator of Temple OS
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