Governance Engineering with Bill Bensing

A newsletter that started as a personal learning and getting-in-touch project by Ivan Krnic grew into a sociotechnical newsletter covering topics of technical excellence, organizational improvements, and productivity.

DevOps is all about breaking silos and fixing bottlenecks! Do you know what bottleneck is our industry solving next?

The first bottleneck was a collaboration between Developers and Operations. By introducing DevOps and resolving that bottleneck, we got an effective team that was very effectively producing the wrong things. Hint: we needed Product people.

We applied the same principles to resolve the second bottleneck and included Product people in the collaboration. And we got an effective team producing the right stuff. But this time, friction appeared with Governing function in the organization. All that speed and new processes weren’t aligned with how things have been done in regulated enterprises. We just found the third bottleneck!

And that’s the bottleneck we’re resolving today! We’re again applying the same principles and including Governance, Risk, and Compliance people in the collaboration. We’re working together to design a software delivery process that is automated and efficient but still provides assurance that we’re doing things by the book.

A new discipline has been rising recently, establishing a common ground for delivery teams and auditors, and designing automation that helps both parties. It’s called Governance Engineering, and you can hear more about it in my conversation with Bill Bensing, who personally coined the term!

Wittgenstein’s Ruler: When Our Opinions Speak More About Us Instead The Topic – How did you react the last time somebody shared their opinion with you? Have you taken their view seriously or dismissed it completely? It depends on their expertise, and Wittgenstein’s Ruler describes what’s happening in our heads in such situations.

The 2023 State of DevOps Report – The 2023 Edition of the State of DevOps Report focuses on Platform Engineering: what it is, its benefits, and how various organizations are embracing this discipline. The industry has finally come to its senses – the Report states that “Platform Engineering is Not New and DevOps is Not Dead” – kudos to Nigel Kersten, Ronan Keenan and Caitlyn O’Connell.

The State of Data Streaming for Financial Services in 2023 – Kai Waehner explores the general trends in the financial services industry in 2023 and shows how the data streaming concept can help implement them.

Wardley Maps for Business – Simon Wardley and David Anderson explain the Wardley Mapping method on a very specific example.

Through a series of short essays, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how we assign immense significance to random events.

Taleb reminds us that “correlation does not imply causation”, noise in data is real, and the presence of zillion white swans doesn’t mean there are no black swans.