I have been intrigued by the recent Knight Capital stories, articles and commentaries especially by members of the DevOps community (see links below).

Here is my quick summary on the Knight Capital story…

The company, Knight Capital, is in the fast pace and highly competitive trading market.
- They run complex automated trading systems, trading services (for options, currencies and bonds), and manage order execution for 19,000 equities.

The event…on August 1, 2012, was a chain reaction to an upgrade incident that…
- resulted in documented losses for the company
- created undesirable "automated” trades with their systems, costing $440M
- exposed a "system / process” flaw created a series of bad trades
- high-lighted a need for improved best-practices and organization-wide collaboration and
- initiated a series of investigations (internal and external) on how and why My take…

Today in many industries the intimate relationship between software and business success in competitive markets is inseparable. For many of us software innovations from previous generations, legacy processes, historic change cadences, outdated best-practices and old-school collaboration standards are at the end of their life-cycle. The lack of Software and IT adaptability is driving up IT costs, polarizing teams, creating technical debt, slowing down business agility, hurting reputations (internal and external), decreasing innovation and eventually creating situations where quality is compromised and services disrupted. So where do we go from here? How do we evolve, transform, transition, modernize, change and support the revolutions that will help our business organizations pursue the highest standards of competitive agility?

I would invite you to bring your knowledge, experience, concerns and insights to explore the industry-changing DevOps journey and discussion. Otherwise, you might be driven directly, or indirectly, to this conversation by an inevitable chaotic event, born from the ongoing clash between loyalty to legacy innovations and investments and the continuous evolution of modern innovations. Do I believe the Knight Capital event could have been avoid with an internal DevOps IT initiative? Absolutely, but it would have taken a courageous and visionary team, not simply interested in maintaining a "status-quo” legacy IT practice.

For my complete blog on this topic see...
http://blogs.collab.net/oncollabnet/2012/08/the-knight-capital-event-and-a-devops-discussion/