Ten Days of Holiday Cheer! Today is community wisdom: quantum, DevOps and TT procurement

GCDCS20 is a wrap! After dozens of speakers and hundreds of participants have had a chance to learn, share and grow, we have a treasure-trove of incredible content – and only a couple of weeks left on the calendar, before 2020 (thankfully) fades away.

So – let’s end on a high note! For the next 10 days, we’ll share some of the best content from the event. As a reminder, people who have registered for GCDCS20 – all nearly-600 of you! – have access to this material and more…and those who haven’t yet joined the group can register for a new “Post Event All-Access” pass for the holidays (makes a great gift, too!).

On the first day of holiday cheer, we bring you a triple-header of community wisdom!

First up, a fascinating look at Preparing the Data Centre for the Quantum Era. Hosted by Quantum Industry Canada, and featuring four of Canada’s leading quantum experts – Dr. Michele Mosca of evolutionQ, Bruno Couillard of Crypto41, Rafal Janik of Xanadu.ai and Alireza Najafi-Yazdi of Anyon Systems, the session provides an eye-opening introduction to the many ways that quantum is poised to change our expectations of computing. InsightaaS just posted a separate piece on the session – here’s the link if you’d like to read it, or you can follow this link to a video replay of the session itself.

Next, a terrific session from our own DC Foresight community, the ‘home’ of GCDCS20. “Best Practices in Outcome-Focused IT Consumption Model Adoption in the Public Sector” is a mouthful – but it’s an incredibly important and complex subject. It starts from three positions that have been fixed over time:

• The need to expand IT options to include consumption-based cloud delivery of as-a-Service capabilities, to capitalize on flexible and cost-effective options for storage and other key functions.
• The belief that adoption of transformative technology in the public sector has been constrained by traditional approaches to deployment, procurement and contracting; that breakthroughs are needed to enable public sector organizations to embrace emerging technologies that can contribute to improved service delivery and better cost management.
• The idea that a procurement and deployment approach that focused on outcomes (the business objective) would yield much better solutions to business problems than the traditional approach, which focuses on inputs (components) that need to be assembled into a system to meet a spec defined at a previous point in time, which must then be integrated into the workflow processes of the users who are in need of IT support.

With sponsorship and guidance from Technology Integration Group, the DC Foresight community explored this issue through a series of research calls, which lead to a report on the topic. Four key contributors to this research – procurement experts Guylaine Carrière of Shared Services Canada and Dennis Silva of BCNET, and public sector IT leaders Sham Satrohan of Ontario’s Ministry of Government and Consumer Services and Kalyan Chakravarthy, CIO of the Region of Durham – combined to make the 60 minute exploration of outcome-focused solutions one of the most compelling sessions in the DC Foresight series.

The third session included in today’s “Community Wisdom” series is DevOps In and Around the Data Centre: Understanding the impact of DevOps on IT operations. The product of a collaboration between GDCS20 and DevOps Toronto, the session brought together DevOps Toronto community leader Steve Pereira, Xodiac founder (and long-time community member) Peter Maddison and Tidal Migrations CEO David Colebatch. DevOps has had, and continues to have, a major impact on data centre operations and IT service delivery practices – and as the data centre industry migrates to Infrastructure as Code (IAC), DevOps is affecting plans and activities inside critical facilities as well. This discussion brings three experts together to demystify the ways that organizations can and should deploy DevOps (and Agile, and Value Stream Mapping) within their processes.

The 10 Days of Holiday Cheer!

Day 1: Community Wisdom – Quantum, DevOps and transformative technology procurement and deployment

All ’10 Days of Holiday Cheer!’ sessions are available to GCDCS20 subscribers. To gain access to these and other resources and join the DC Foresight professional community, please follow this link and click on “Register.”