“Culture” is nebulous and seemingly ephemeral, as it consists of a lot of touchy-feely sentiments which tend to be at odds with how engineers have trained themselves to think – rationally and logically.
DevOps is generally recognized as a means of driving better business outcomes via improvements in process, tools, and culture within the IT organization. Process is immediately recognizable – it’s the way you’re doing business today, and everyone involved can probably identify at least a couple of tweaks they believe would improve the process overall. Tooling is a bit more difficult, as to do it right you need to invest in tools which support your workflows, and if your process is broken or less than ideal today then selecting the right tool becomes much more complicated – the conventional wisdom is to first optimize your process and workflows, and then to select the right tool for the job. The third aspect, however, is much harder to nail down. “Culture” is nebulous and seemingly ephemeral, as it consists of a lot of touchy-feely sentiments which tend to be at odds with how engineers have trained themselves to think – rationally and logically.