The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

by Gene Kim

Information Security is always flashing their badges at people and making urgent demands, regardless of the consequences to the rest of the organization, which is why we don’t invite them to many meetings. The best way to make sure something doesn’t get done is to have them in the room. They’re always coming up with a million reasons why anything we do will create a security hole that alien space-hackers will exploit to pillage our entire organization and steal all our code, intellectual property, credit card numbers, and pictures of our loved ones. These are potentially valid risks, but I often can’t connect the dots between their shrill, hysterical, and self-righteous demands and actually improving the defensibility of our environment.

Every time that we let Brent fix something that none of us can replicate, Brent gets a little smarter, and the entire system gets dumber.