Gregor Hohpe has been a recognised expert in architecture for over 15 years, most recently with his work with a large worldwide insurance company. This is a special opportunity to spend a day learning and sharing experiences on how to navigate a digital transformation in the enterprise. Many large enterprises are under pressure to transform their IT architecture and organization, as their business is attacked by “digital disruptors”. IT architects can play a key role in such a transformation because they combine the technical, communication, and organizational skill to apply IT for the benefit of the business. Their job is not an easy one, though: they must maneuver in an organization where IT is often still seen as a cost center, where operations means “run” as opposed to “change”, and where middle-management has become cozy neither understanding the business strategy nor the underlying technology. This workshop illustrates how software or IT architects can play an active role in driving the digital transformation of a large enterprise. To do so, they need to extend their horizon beyond dealing with technology to navigate organizational politics, get management attention, work with external vendors, and pick the right battles. The examples and anecdotes originate from the presenter’s experience as Chief Architect in a large financial services organization that is undergoing a massive IT transformation.

Governments the world over are beginning to recognise the need to embrace digital change and transform how they provide services. A pioneer of that was the UK which in 2011 began an ambitious programme of digital change, led by a new unit called the Government Digital Service. Over five years they transformed users' experience of dozens of government services, saved billions of pounds in the process, and embedded significant new capabilities across government. James Stewart was one of the founders of that unit and led much of its work on technology and security. He'll share some lessons from that journey and how they can be used for others on a similar journey in any complex organisation (not just governments).

You have great ideas. You're smart. The people in your organization are smart. Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc -- the rest is easy -- simply make a transition plan and transparently explain the benefits. These and other organizational change myths will be tackled by Linda's talk about patterns for introducing new ideas. She will provide some useful tips for helping you start on Monday morning to grow, step by step, any innovation.

Twitter has rapidly evolved in how we do Machine Learning over the last few years. We rapidly evolved from making incremental improvements to our existing Logistic Regression models to a wave of new Deep Learning architectures. At the same time, we were faced with the challenge of uneven distribution of ML expertise across the company. This is the story of the Cortex team that enabled this machine learning transformation across the entire company by making a set of careful strategic investments.

The ever-increasing computational capacity has enabled us to acquire, process and analyze larger data-sets and information. We increasingly want to take a data-driven lens to solve business problems. But business problems are inherently '<em>wicked in nature</em>' - with multiple stakeholders, different problem definition, different solutions interdependence, constraints, amplifying loops etc. There is no one trick to solve them. What is required is learning a structured approach to problem-solving that can be applied to a large set of these problems. One possible way is to use a Hypotheses Driven Approach - problems definition, scoping, issue identification and hypothesis generation - as a starting point for this. In this workshop, you will learn how to apply a hypothesis-driven approach to any business problem through seven pragmatic steps:<ol><li>Frame * Acquire * Refine * Transform * Explore * Model * InsightThe focus will be to learn the principles through an applied case study and using an iterative and agile methodology.

Most organizations today have adopted IT infrastructure automation tools and dynamic infrastructure platforms such as private or public clouds. However, the technology alone isn't enough to help IT respond quickly and reliably to changing opportunities and challenges. At worst they can lead to a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" situation, where the ability to rapidly spin up new infrastructure leads to a sprawl of poorly maintained systems. Infrastructure as Code is an approach to managing infrastructure that leverages software engineering practices. Companies like Netflix, Facebook, and Etsy have pioneered a new generation of principles and practices for IT change management. IT teams who have adopted these ideas find that they can not only make changes far more frequently than they could with old ways of working, but they can actually increase the reliability, security and quality of their IT services.

"It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory." - W. Edwards Deming Work takes time to flow through an organization and ultimately be deployed to production where it captures value. It’s critical to reduce time-to-production. Software - for many organizations and industries - is a competitive advantage. Organizations break their larger software ambitions into smaller, independently deployable, feature -centric batches of work - microservices. In order to reduce the round-trip between stations of work, organizations collapse or consolidate as much of them as possible and automate the rest; developers and operations beget "devops," cloud-based services and platforms (like Cloud Foundry) automate operations work and break down the need for ITIL tickets and change management boards. But velocity, for velocity's sake, is dangerous. Microservices invite architectural complexity that few are prepared to address. In this talk, we'll look at how high-performance organizations like Ticketmaster, Alibaba, and Netflix make short work of that complexity with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud.

The digitalization calls for rapid organizational flexibility and adaptability. This has an impact on all dimensions of a company: its strategy, structure, and the processes. Agile will help implementing some of this flexibility and adaptability yet mainly in terms of processes. Thus, the digital transformation needs companies to change beyond Agile. Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, and Sociocracy provide the missing links for a company to fully embrace digitalization. The combination of these concepts enables a company not only to survive but also to thrive (digital) disruptions.

Drawing on his experience advising clients on platform adoption, James Lewis explores the benefits that platforms can bring, the organizational limitations that make platform adoption attractive, how we currently overcome these limitations, and the paradigm shift in thinking needed to get the most out of them.

Leadership is a dance of stepping up to provide guidance and then stepping back to let the team deliver. This is easier said than done. As one of the co-authors of the book "Stand Back and Deliver," Todd will demonstrate some of the tools that he has used to help with this leadership dance. These tools include: * Purpose Alignment Model * Context Leadership Model * Business Value Model * Trust Ownership Model

Dr.Bauer and her team have been working to build genome-scale data pipelines that address the computational challenges and limits present in today’s cancer genomic (bioinformatics) data workflows. Dr. Bauer and her team have built solutions which use modern architectures, such as serverless (AWS Lambda) and also customised machine learning on Apache Spark. AWS Community Hero. The CSIRO team is pushing solutions at the cutting edge of bioinformatics research which best utilizes advances in cloud technologies. In this demo-filled session, Dr.Denis will discuss and demonstrate some of the work they’ve done in the bioinformatics research.

Unikernels are specialized, single address space machine image constructed by using library operating systems and are gaining a lot of attention in the industry. Due to less amount of code deployed, they have smaller attack surface and hence improved security. This talk describes what Unikernels are, what are their advantages & disadvantages and how are they different from containers & microkernels. It uses MirageOS as an example to show how the developer selects the minimal set of libraries which correspond to the OS constructs required for their application to run and these libraries are then compiled with the application to build sealed, fixed-purpose images which run directly on a hypervisor or hardware without an intervening OS.

This is an experience report giving challenges while building automated , AI empowered application that converts the mundane job of an IT recruiter to an augmented job. Problem: Recruiters hated transcribing resume data into long forms to enter into our ATS (Applicant Tracking System) . Using standard resume parsers didn't help because these parsers could not understand most of the technical words in the resumes. We tried buiding our own parser using the http://gate.ac.ukGATE library. It worked but GATE is single threaded and runs into memory issues at scale. Also training the parser to recognize thousands of technical words would need us to invest in a large team of professionals. We had to make this work at web scale so that many users could train the parser to recognize technical terms that were common to each user's context. The UX has to be as smooth as a prosthetic extension. The user experience should get the user dependent on and addicted to using the application. Performance assumes central role - latency of a few milliseconds can send users off to other distractions. Building user retention and loyalty is even more challenging. This report shows how the principles of "https://www.slideshare.net/amyjokim/what-is-game-thinkingGame Thinking" can be used to engage and motivate the users to become trainers of ML/NLP algorithms. Solution: We built a highly scalable containerized microservice to parse resumes using GATE. We deployed these Docker containers on AWS and used Kubernetes to do auto scaling which led to an amazingly fast resume parsing service which could parse a hundred resumes in less than a minute. We worked around the memory leak issue by implementing the circuit breaker pattern. According tohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster Raph Koster users derive pleasure by learning to use your application. We built the application to "teach" the users to "train" the parser to recognize terms that are relevant to their specific context. This is supposed to give the users a pleasurable experience and a feeling of empowerment.We will present how the progression of hypothesis-driven sprints is helping us get closer to the goal.

Architects in the enterprise are often regarded as ivory tower residents who bestow their utopian plans upon project teams in the form of colorful diagrams that bear little to no resemblance to reality. The most suspicious in this group are often the "Enterprise Architects" who are perceived as being furthest from actual technical problems. However, large-scale IT operation and transformation require transparency across hundreds or thousands of applications running on all sorts of middleware in data centers around the globe. The very enterprise architects are likely the only ones who stand a chance to bring transparency into such an environment and who can direct IT investments in the hundreds of millions of Euros towards modernization and run-cost reduction. This sounds a lot more exciting and valuable than drawing pictures! This session takes a serious but light-hearted look at the role of enterprise architects in modern IT organizations.

Organizations can improve their Agile scaling efforts by focusing on 5 common challenges: the way teams are chartered, how people come together to form teams, how their values and working agreements are protected, how they are helped to remove impediments, and how they learn to improve what they deliver based on feedback. These common challenges can derail and distract the efforts of the organization to reap the benefits of agile, empirical product delivery. This presentation discusses these challenges and strategies organizations can use to overcome them.

IoT, the prevalence of specialized interconnected devices, has invaded business and home. The myriad of devices, hubs, and APIs has created a Tower of Babel that makes the Android phone scene seem mild. Such devices are inherently less network ­reliable than previous products, primarily due to the casual attachment (convenient outlets). Add to this heterogeneous soup the security exposure that has already been exploited in DDoS attacks, and you have an environment begging for technical solutions. We propose Asynchronous MicroServices as a solution. Borrowing a page from historical J2ME thinking and more recent implementations using IFTTT, we introduce small bridging MicroServices for the various devices. Further, also consistent with MicroServices, we keep these services very simple: They broadcast device status to an event bus, or listen for action commands to relay to the devices from the same bus. Interaction among the various IoT devices is delegated to yet another set of MicroServices. One exemplary composite application would accept signals from motion detectors to turn on appropriate lights, or alternatively alerting the owner of unauthorized intrusion. Using the same motion detectors, lights can be dimmed and eventually turned off. Room temperatures and even audio/video gear could be adjusted as well. Using Asynchronous MicroServices, we can also set up controlled access from the outside world, rather than exposing each device with its own vulnerabilities. Finally, we wrap up talking about the challenges of implementing this in my own flat using Hue lights, Amazon Alexa, and 4th generation Apple TV. We run these MicroServices in local containers attached to the same home network. Docker support of ARM devices enables low-cost redundancy as well.

Building and scaling data science capability is an imperative for enterprises and startups aiming to adopt a data-driven lens for their business. However, crafting a successful data-science strategy is not straightforward and requires answering the following questions: * Strategy & Tactics: What part of the business should I target first for adoption? Should I take a jump-start approach or a bootstrap approach? * Process & Systems: How should I set up an initial process for data science? How to integrate data-driven processes with existing business systems? * Structure & Roles: Should I adopt a functional or a business-focused data science structure? What specialized roles should I be hiring for Data engineering, ML expert, Visualisation expert, and /or Data Analyst? * Tools & Stack: Should I build a vertical or horizontal data science stack? How do I integrate data science models with existing applications? * Engineering & Technical: What are the pitfalls to watch out for? How to avoid pre-mature over-engineering of data science? How to manage the ongoing technical debt for data science? * Skills & Competencies: How do I up-skill and build differentiated data-science competency across the organization? The speakers draw upon their experiences in setting up and advising data science teams at enterprises and startups to share best practices on how to craft a successful data strategy and then go on to execute it. The will use case-studies to discuss what worked and failure points to watch out for.

In the hospitality industry, Analytical solutions are used to price hotel rooms. These Analytical solutions must incorporate additional data feeds that represent the variables impacting hotel prices in the real world. While incorporating these data feeds like prices published by the competitors on the Web or reputation of the hotel in the social media there are unique challenges. In this case study, I want to share my experiences in solving these problems that involve understanding the hidden patterns in the data feed, resolving data sanity issues and finally incorporating these data feeds into the solution in an iterative manner. This journey requires close collaboration with not only the internal teams but also the external clients. In some cases, clients suggest enhancements to this usage of additional data feeds that need to be incorporated a relatively short timeframe. There is no one size fits all solution for using these data feeds. Additional configuration items need to build around these data feeds. In this case study, I want to share a success story in incorporating these data feeds using agile principles.

Large Insurance enterprises find difficult to renew and find new ways to transform their customer experience, improve operational process and find new business models. As an experiment they engaged an insure-tech startup to lead their digital transformation journey.. This case study is about a point of view, approaches, challenges and cultural surprises that we faced during this journey.. The more we share more we learn!!

The presentation will demonstrate why SAFe is the most widely adopted agile scaling framework by global international companies and gaining traction in India. SAFe’s practices have evolved from Agile practices and methods, Lean product development, systems thinking, and observation of successful enterprises. This presentation will introduce the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe version 4.5), including its core values, principles, and practices, along with a roadmap for implementation. The presentation will explain the roles that are needed to successfully deliver value at scale. SAFe provides guidance and training for scaling Agile development across the portfolio, large solution, program, and team levels. The presentation will describe the most critical elements needed to realize the Framework’s benefits.

Digital success demands market-responsive teams that can truly solve problems and not just build some software. Software projects are a popular way of funding and organizing software development. They organize work into temporary, build-only teams and are funded with specific benefits projected in a business case. These methods are unsuited for these new demands. In this talk, Sriram presents an alternative to projects called Product-Mode. Product-mode uses durable, ideate-build-run teams working on a persistent business issue. Product-mode allows teams to reorient quickly, reduces their end-to-end cycle time, and allows validation of actual benefits by using short-cycle iterations while maintaining the architectural integrity of their software to preserve their long-term effectiveness. This approach is very popular among digital natives and is gaining ground with old-guard businesses.

In 2017, 1 Million candidates applied for UPSC prelims exam to fill 980 vacancies. That is a 0.1% chance of getting selected. Candidates spend over a year preparing for these exams. Unlike many other exams, these exams require a lot of real-time knowledge of News and Current Affairs. Also, they need to prepare not only for objective questions but also for essay type subjective questions. So while preparing for these exams, candidates can't just go through static content from previous years. To evaluate their answers and to give them instant feedback, we can't rely on curated content. To address these challenges, we built India's first education platform powered by Artificial Intelligence. We provide: * instant feedback on the descriptive answers * provide in-depth analysis of candidates strengths and weaknesses * create a summary of current affairs with timeline, opinions and linked syllabus concepts We believe this is the future of online education. Come to this talk to understand how digitization can disrupt current educational platforms.

Over 3 months John recorded over 75 hours of interviews and spoke to some of the most respected people in the industry to produce an audio documentary that attempts to answer the question "What is safety? And why is it important anyway?" This highly interactive talk will present the findings and guide and challenge you through a journey to understanding safety. Including short interactive sessions and role play exercises to cover the following topics: * What is safety? * What are the elements that make a team effective? * Is psychological safety the foundation to team performance? * What can we all do to help foster psychological safety in our teams? * What is the relationship between safety, stress and engagement? * What is the profound impact of a lack of safety and engagement on society? This talk has grown as John created the new podcast http://www.agilepath.fm/" data-rt-link-type="externalThe Agile Path. The first season on this podcast is about safety in teams. John has interviewed world renowned specialists in the field; Christopher Avery, David Marquet, Jerry Weinberg, Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, Woody Zuill and many more in over 75 hours of audio. This has been a fascinating deep dive learning experience for John and he hopes to explore these insights with the audience.

A deep reflection on the continuous improvement journey post the Agile Transformation era. In this talk, I will share our successes and failures in moving the agility needle in line with organizational goals. Do come and learn how to roll the wheels of continuous sustainable improvements.

Shell is one of the largest energy companies in the world, with a long history in Oil & Gas. The Oil & Gas market is known for its long (multi-year) projects and pay-back periods. However, the rise of renewable energy and a changing technology landscape requires doing business differently. One of Shell’s responses to the changing environment is embracing digitalization as an opportunity, and fundamental element of doing business. Nils Kappeyne (VP & CIO of Integrated Gas & New Energies) will share his perspective on how Shell is ‘acting its way into the future’. In this key-note, Nils will explain more about the ‘digital ventures’ that are part of Shell’s New Energies business, and share how a corporation with >90,000 staff is on its way to embed digitalization in the way we do business on a daily basis.

Scaled Professional Scrum™ (SPS) with Nexus™ is a 2-day course that is designed as an experiential workshop where students learn how to scale Scrum using the Nexus Framework. Throughout, you are introduced to the artifacts and events within the framework, the new Nexus Integration Team role, along with more than 50 associated practices. The course also includes a free attempt at the globally recognized Scaled Professional Scrum certification exam. Over the 2 days, students will simulate a large software development project using the Nexus Framework. The workshop is delivered using an end-to-end case study where students work together to organize and simulate a scaled software development project. Throughout the workshop, students will be introduced to more than 50 practices that can be used to help reduce complexity and dependencies at scale. The workshop will provide students with an understanding of how to launch, structure, staff, and manage a large Agile project using Scrum. Throughout the workshop, students will learn the infrastructure, tools and practices needed to successfully scale Scrum to maximize the value of their software development initiative. By taking a hands-on approach, students are fully engaged in the learning process where they see first-hand the challenges in large-scale development initiatives and solutions for getting the work back on track. They will leave the workshop with techniques to detect irregularities and how to address them appropriately.

In this workshop, we'll look at how to build cloud-native Java applications. A cloud-native application is one that is designed to fully exploit a cloud platform both in the application layer – where things decompose into microservices – and at the data layer where NoSQL offers better horizontal scaling and fitness for specific purpose. WHAT WILL I LEARN * writing services and handling non-functional requirements like metrics and logging with Spring Boot * scaling out safely and building fault-tolerant systems using Spring Cloud and its support for distributed systems patterns like the circuit breaker, service registration and discovery, and centralized configuration management. * offloading as much operational work as possible to the platform, Cloud Foundry

The necessity of rapid change is the topic number one nowadays. This regards on the one hand organizational change that we need to create and promote in order to stay in business, to respond to market pressures, and to be innovative. On the other hand this respects change that we face as organizations and individuals. During this workshop I want to provide answers –using both theory and practice– to the following questions: * What’s happening with affected persons during a change? * According to complexity theory there is no resistance to change. So why is change still hard and how can we introduce change smoothly? * What is fundamental to every change? * What needs to be considered for implementing change successfully? * What kinds of change can help making the organizational structure more agile and the organizational strategy better aligned with current needs so that your organization is able to drive the market instead of being driven by the market? In order to answer these questions we will make use from the insights from different change models, Human Systems Dynamics (HSD), and Fearless Change.

Scaled Professional Scrum™ (SPS) with Nexus™ is a 2-day course that is designed as an experiential workshop where students learn how to scale Scrum using the Nexus Framework. Throughout, you are introduced to the artifacts and events within the framework, the new Nexus Integration Team role, along with more than 50 associated practices. The course also includes a free attempt at the globally recognized Scaled Professional Scrum certification exam. Over the 2 days, students will simulate a large software development project using the Nexus Framework. The workshop is delivered using an end-to-end case study where students work together to organize and simulate a scaled software development project. Throughout the workshop, students will be introduced to more than 50 practices that can be used to help reduce complexity and dependencies at scale. The workshop will provide students with an understanding of how to launch, structure, staff, and manage a large Agile project using Scrum. Throughout the workshop, students will learn the infrastructure, tools and practices needed to successfully scale Scrum to maximize the value of their software development initiative. By taking a hands-on approach, students are fully engaged in the learning process where they see first-hand the challenges in large-scale development initiatives and solutions for getting the work back on track. They will leave the workshop with techniques to detect irregularities and how to address them appropriately.

As organizations embrace more and more cloud technologies, we're recognizing that many of our established approaches to security don't easily translate into the new IT landscape. And with so much attention around cyber threats, it's never been more important to be on top of your security. James Stewart shares techniques for considering the security of whole systems and explores ways of bringing together cross-disciplinary teams to collectively own secure designs. You’ll learn strategies for understanding the various types of bad actors, who want to break the systems and ways to help the whole team contribute to a conversation about how to address those issues and prioritize them against other user needs. You'll then apply them to modern cloud environments, both IaaS and SaaS, and reflect on how to apply this new understanding in your organizations.

You’ve tried and tried to convince people of your position. You’ve laid out your logical arguments on impressive PowerPoint slides—but you are still not able to sway them. Cognitive scientists understand that the approach you are taking is rarely successful. Often you must speak to others’ subconscious motivators rather than their rational, analytic side. Linda Rising shares influence strategies that you can use to more effectively convince others to see things your way. These strategies take advantage of hardwired traits: “liking”—we like people who are like us; “reciprocity”—we repay in kind; “social proof”—we follow the lead of others similar to us; “consistency”—we align ourselves with our previous commitments; “authority”—we defer to authority figures; and “scarcity”—we want more of something when there is less to be had. Learn how to build on these traits as a way of bringing others to your side. Use this valuable toolkit in addition to the logical left-brain techniques on which we depend.

Hands-on development of asynchronous micro-services using a bus architecture. While “micro-services” is becoming a heavily over-worked term, it has been interpreted many ways. In this hands-on workshop, we will explore a particular style, tiny asynchronous services, that was the core of one of the most successful implementations. Given an animated specification of flow, we will embark on delivering the proposed services, wrestling with the issues common to this new paradigm. Participants have a choice of languages, with new starting code in Java, C#, and Ruby. At the end of the workshop, we will discuss MicroServices challenges and organizations that are optimized for such architectures.