Good morning – and thank you XXX. My name is Daniel Spurling and I have the pleasure of leading a very innovative team and working for a great company that is changing the world
Getty Images: For 20 years, Getty Images has changed the world through imagery. Images are key to how every one of us communicate. Imagery evokes emotion and drives change. At Getty, we seek to provide innovative and revolutionary ways to communicate ideas, concepts, and true reality – imagery that can be used as a vehicle for change. We serve more than 1.5 million active customers in more than 185 countries - providing them with the best collection of Conceptual and Editorial content in the world. And earlier this year, we launched our consumer-focused embed offering - making 40 million of our images available to anyone, free of charge, for non-commercial use.
Now I came to Getty about a year ago, and what drew me was the amazing culture, the commitment to our customers, and the desire to raise the bar, push the envelope, and get shit done.
Getty Images: For 20 years, Getty Images has changed the world through imagery. Images are key to how every one of us communicate. Imagery evokes emotion and drives change. At Getty, we seek to provide innovative and revolutionary ways to communicate ideas, concepts, and true reality – imagery that can be used as a vehicle for change. We serve more than 1.5 million active customers in more than 185 countries - providing them with the best collection of Conceptual and Editorial content in the world. And earlier this year, we launched our consumer-focused embed offering - making 40 million of our images available to anyone, free of charge, for non-commercial use.
Now I came to Getty about a year ago, and what drew me was the amazing culture, the commitment to our customers, and the desire to raise the bar, push the envelope, and get shit done.
Getty Images: For 20 years, Getty Images has changed the world through imagery. Images are key to how every one of us communicate. Imagery evokes emotion and drives change. At Getty, we seek to provide innovative and revolutionary ways to communicate ideas, concepts, and true reality – imagery that can be used as a vehicle for change. We serve more than 1.5 million active customers in more than 185 countries - providing them with the best collection of Conceptual and Editorial content in the world. And earlier this year, we launched our consumer-focused embed offering - making 40 million of our images available to anyone, free of charge, for non-commercial use.
Now I came to Getty about a year ago, and what drew me was the amazing culture, the commitment to our customers, and the desire to raise the bar, push the envelope, and get shit done.
Getty Images: For 20 years, Getty Images has changed the world through imagery. Images are key to how every one of us communicate. Imagery evokes emotion and drives change. At Getty, we seek to provide innovative and revolutionary ways to communicate ideas, concepts, and true reality – imagery that can be used as a vehicle for change. We serve more than 1.5 million active customers in more than 185 countries - providing them with the best collection of Conceptual and Editorial content in the world. And earlier this year, we launched our consumer-focused embed offering - making 40 million of our images available to anyone, free of charge, for non-commercial use.
Now I came to Getty about a year ago, and what drew me was the amazing culture, the commitment to our customers, and the desire to raise the bar, push the envelope, and get shit done.
Getty Images: For 20 years, Getty Images has changed the world through imagery. Images are key to how every one of us communicate. Imagery evokes emotion and drives change. At Getty, we seek to provide innovative and revolutionary ways to communicate ideas, concepts, and true reality – imagery that can be used as a vehicle for change. We serve more than 1.5 million active customers in more than 185 countries - providing them with the best collection of Conceptual and Editorial content in the world. And earlier this year, we launched our consumer-focused embed offering - making 40 million of our images available to anyone, free of charge, for non-commercial use.
Now I came to Getty about a year ago, and what drew me was the amazing culture, the commitment to our customers, and the desire to raise the bar, push the envelope, and get shit done.
Getty Images: For 20 years, Getty Images has changed the world through imagery. Images are key to how every one of us communicate. Imagery evokes emotion and drives change. At Getty, we seek to provide innovative and revolutionary ways to communicate ideas, concepts, and true reality – imagery that can be used as a vehicle for change. We serve more than 1.5 million active customers in more than 185 countries - providing them with the best collection of Conceptual and Editorial content in the world. And earlier this year, we launched our consumer-focused embed offering - making 40 million of our images available to anyone, free of charge, for non-commercial use.
Now I came to Getty about a year ago, and what drew me was the amazing culture, the commitment to our customers, and the desire to raise the bar, push the envelope, and get shit done.
Getty Images: For 20 years, Getty Images has changed the world through imagery. Images are key to how every one of us communicate. Imagery evokes emotion and drives change. At Getty, we seek to provide innovative and revolutionary ways to communicate ideas, concepts, and true reality – imagery that can be used as a vehicle for change. We serve more than 1.5 million active customers in more than 185 countries - providing them with the best collection of Conceptual and Editorial content in the world. And earlier this year, we launched our consumer-focused embed offering - making 40 million of our images available to anyone, free of charge, for non-commercial use.
Now I came to Getty about a year ago, and what drew me was the amazing culture, the commitment to our customers, and the desire to raise the bar, push the envelope, and get shit done.
It was comical for me earlier this year to speak at //build. It was just a couple minute blurb talking about the value that Puppet has brought to Getty and someone tweeted “blah blah” and I realized that I was that TalkingHead, the Dilbert Pointy haired guy – I had never been that – I was always trying to push the envelope. But I have more and more realized that this space is being formed, carved, and enabled by practitioners such as all of you. I am not that – I am the dreaded Exec – it is almost a funny slip, maybe even intentional, that hard core puppeters don’t like Exec – it isn’t really extensible and it is hard to operationally support – But there are some good execs!! I see and am passionate about supporting and enabling my team and all of you who are leading this transformation forward.
So while my talk today will be more focused on driving the culture shift to encourage adoption of Puppet, let’s help our technology teams ditch the stodgy feel and just get shit done. …while swearing is a great way to emphasize a point, I couldn’t exactly have it emblazoned across my shirt, so here we are….
Like I mentioned a few minutes ago – it did and does start with people and Getty was no different. We absolutely followed the “by practitioners, for practitioners” model. We animated with the right connectors and motivators.
Here in the audience are some of our key guys in this space- Drew/Justin/Preston – these guys were the front runners in Getty. They were the ones who sounded slightly crazy in the beginning but were effective at selling upstream and getting executive buy-in. They knew that you have to find a sponsor – someone who will catch the vision and remove barriers of funding, org structure, processes, etc. They also have and continue to sell sideways and downstream. They have acted as the sensei, as one of our team members put it, but they also are constantly working at not creating cliques. They have to fight to keep a culture of inclusion – something really hard when it feels like some people are just trying to find the failures.
Now here is where we struggled to get and keep buy-in from our closest peers. This goes along with the difficulty in of a reorg – it takes time for people to change – and when it comes to having a group that all are moving in the same direction, then you need to have that direction defined. This is where we are animating with clear understanding and expectations. Right off the bat, we made Puppet common – everyone knows about puppet from our NOC to our architects – and every individual and manager in between!
Then, we essentially created a “you must be this high to ride this ride” type definitions – essentially a RACI with who does what, along with a training plan to get there.
We have identified four primary groups
The Puppet consumer - knows enough to go into the console and hit a button - register and classify servers and review errors. Low barrier to entry
The Puppet contributor – someone who tweaks or updates what exists but definitely understands what “it” does
The Puppet pro / admin – someone who understands the framework and can build new packages and features
The Puppet architect – these are the setters of the vision and associated roadmap for how we are getting there
Again, we are taking this framework and defining where we need these right people. And we are wrapping training, goals, etc around these role expectations
We are animating with the right structure and people, now we turn to animating through integration into existing systems and processes. This cements the processes into our day to day activities.
We have looked into how people work and identified how to integrate Puppet into our workflows. For example, we have out own HuBot in hipchat, named “conky”, which is integrated with the Puppet deployment pipeline so that you can complete tasks, like deployments or get notifications. We also have integrated Puppet into ServiceNow so that tasks such as puppet changes are automatically tracked in our Change Management tool. And we are now working to get puppet integrated with our CMDB so that we have less manual data from humans, and more dynamic data from our trusted source.
Now we didn’t just create some greenfield sandbox to do this. We are animating with existing solutions. We are pushing Puppet into the brown field – not just the green field. We are in the real world where there are limited outage windows, limited budget, limited risk tolerance, etc etc. We are doing this intentionally - only supporting the shiny new stuff will potentially promote the feeling of a science experiment – that this is not “a real boy”.
For example, we used Puppet to manage the full environment deployment of our iStock QA environment. This is a janky environment that is in the middle of a metamorphosis – but we didn’t wait til it was completely new, built on new supported building blocks, and in a perfect state – we animated in the brownfield
Again, we want this to be seen as a real solution to our business problems – Not just a toy. Will it work for everything? No, there will be times when the cost outweighs the benefit. But we have started small, have had wins, have learning under our belts and are now at a place where we are tackling larger tasks
So in closing, I’ve talked a lot about what we did, but everyone’s path is different-
You are here proving you are empowered – even if you empowered yourself! And you are part this community, with smart people who have shared interests – together you are important and are changing the culture - you are making IT a Strategic asset because you care about the business. Now I challenge you to bring the rest of the team onboard: incent behavior with the right organizational structure, train and support the people, and make puppetized processes a part of daily life
Animate the Puppet
Thank you