Database DevOps: A Genuine Journey & An Introduction to Adoption Management

Doors open 6:30 and pizza is usually at the beginning. First talk will be at 7 and each talk lasts approximately 50-60 minutes.

Speaker: Gavin Payne
An Introduction to Adoption Management - and why it's become relevant to the tech industry

For many years, organisations have widely recognised managing change has as a critical, yet rarely mentioned leadership skill. So why the recent interest by the tech industry in adoption management, the lesser known sibling of change management?

Part of the answer comes from the need for organisations to increasingly get all of their staff using new technology services to transform how they work. A messaging system only becomes useful when enough people you know also use it. The second part of the answer is the need for tech vendors that sell pay-per-use cloud services to make sure their end users actually start and then keep using their services – or else they get no revenue.

Adoption management can be considered to be the art and science of helping people to become more effective by using something new. It could be a mobile app to book gym classes, a security service to stop data leakage or a new collaboration system to share files. Whatever an organisation's need for adoption management is, there are standard ways to help people manage change - or in this case, adopt new tools.

This session explains the need for the tech industry to formally manage adoption and the academic models that explore why people adopt change at different speeds and in different ways. It then provides guided examples of how the speaker has led adoption management projects that increased the use of new services, but also made sure users were more efficient than they used to be. While these examples focus on adopting Microsoft 365 services, attendees could use them in a broad range of situations.

Speaker: Richard Griffiths, Database Technical Lead, Confused.com

DevOps for databases is a daunting task, but we have been on that journey and now manual releases are the exception. How did we get there?

As well as telling you our journey, we’ll finish with a demo of there being no infrastructure to fully provisioning a PaaS database architecture in Azure, following up with making a change through automated CI builds and release pipelines in Azure DevOps.