Charles Betz

Happy holidays from the DevOps theme team! Our merry band of Forrester analysts covering enterprise architecture, infrastructure, application development, application security, and technology strategy meets periodically to share research, debate trends, and dive into breaking news. What are a few of the trends and themes that have caught our attention this year? Let’s dive in […]

Note: I have heard some concerns I’m “throwing I&O under the bus” here. That’s not the intent. I&O’s struggles stem from deliberate operating model choices by senior leaders. The individual contributors have always worked hard in difficult circumstances. I truly believe that proper product management will benefit them.  I just got back from the DevOps […]

Learn how the three finalists for Forrester’s Enterprise Architecture Award for North America drive their EA strategy and its impacts.

Find out which firms have made the cut and what the next steps are in naming the finalists.

When we imagine the future of DevOps, we see three primary vectors of evolution: people, practices, and platforms.

Late Sunday evening, Bloomberg reported rumors of advanced Broadcom talks to acquire VMware, which has since been confirmed this morning. In light of Broadcom’s investment activities in the past few years, this news is unsurprising. It made a string of massively expensive enterprise software company acquisitions: Brocade Communications Systems in 2016 ($5.9 billion), CA Technologies […]

There are few capabilities in modern technology more conflicted than enterprise architecture (EA, or often just “architecture.”) Predictions of EA’s demise are common. Notable influencers in digital-native firms such as Amazon VP Adrian Cockcroft believe that architects per se aren’t needed, because “that’s what managers do.” Stories abound of EA organizations being disbanded because they […]

What Is Going On? One of our less pleasant responsibilities here at Forrester is commenting on serious business, security, or technical failures in the digital and IT industry. Due to its duration and the implications for a subset of the user base, the current Atlassian outage rises to that level. Atlassian is staking its future […]

In 2017, Forrester expanded upon the IT service management market (ITSM) to establish enterprise service management (ESM) as a chosen area of coverage, continuing this research with a 2019 Forrester Wave™ evaluation. Now, we are pleased to announce The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Management, Q4 2021. In 2018, ITSM vendors were still completing the transition […]

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.” — William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2 One conversation I’ve found myself in over the past 20 years is the debate over IT portfolio terminology: Application Service Product Platform Why is this important? Because organizations use […]

Learn how the convergence of traditional IT practices with the discipline of product management can benefit your IT organization.

The concept of an “iron triangle” is an old one. In project management, it’s the trade-offs between cost, schedule, and scope. “Pick any two” is a common rule of thumb — that is, you can optimize for two but not three. One variation on the triangle is cost, schedule, and quality (scope is replaced by […]

If you want to be unpopular with an agile or DevOps team, tell them, “You need to use the shared service.” Shared services have a well-deserved reputation for bureaucracy, one-size-fits-all standards, long lead times, and high transaction costs. Shared services per se are not the problem. Amazon is a public, shared service, and it’s well […]

One of the biggest hurdles for DevOps is meeting the need for both specialists and generalists. Principal Analyst Charles Betz talks with DevOps expert Don Reinertsen about striking the right balance.

I talk to many Forrester customers every week who are transforming: digital, agile, DevOps, or some mix of the three. One common theme is an interest in product team organization. This has been a hot topic for some time, and interest still seems to be increasing. To explain what a product team is, I use […]

Principal analyst Charles Betz provides key recommendations for modernizing IT change management in the wake of agile transformation.

Learn how the pandemic's increased uncertainty and volatility has produced some attractive M&A opportunities in DevOps and IT Management.

Challenging times call for creative responses and quick pivots. Learn how some organizations are rethinking innovation to thrive.

This year, I led my first custom survey research for Forrester, the Q4 2020 Modern Technology Operations Survey. We selected a random panel of 268 digital and IT professionals with day-to-day responsibility for operating digital systems. (We did not rule out developers, as long as they also had runtime responsibilities). We also looked for folks […]