For as long as I’ve been in IT we’ve always broken up our initiatives into people, process and tools to understand their impact on an organization. Historically though, we’ve had a Taylor-istic view of ‘people’ and tend to really think of them as a set of skills. If the new process and tools required new skills we’d ask ourselves if we needed to train the existing folks or hire new one, probably a little of both. It is exactly that view of people and the prescriptive view of the need to tell them what to do and how to do it that has hindered and strategic benefits to manifest. DevOps is actually about investing in people and creating a learning environment where they can figure out the new process and tools needed. That’s why DevOps has been shown to affect the bottom line, because it’s not really an IT investment. It’s an investment in creating a climate where a culture of learning can flourish.