Rethinking knowledge work with GitHub
- Summary:
- Julio Avalos, the Chief Business Officer GitHub, believes DevOps principles and tools can lead a change in the way organisations deal with knowledge work.
How do organisations manage and effectively use the massive information they are acquiring? Julio Avalos, GitHub's Chief Business Officer believes his company has the answer.
Avalos, who joined GitHub as the company's first in house lawyer in 2012 and has since become the organisation's Chief Business Officer, spoke last week to Diginomica about the global launch of GitHub.com, the software-as-a-service version of its enterprise product, and their announcement of regional presences in South East Asia and the Australia-New Zealand regions.
During the conversation he described his vision for GitHub with the company's services going way beyond developer operations as organisations struggle with managing knowledge locked away in network nooks and crannies:
All organisations have this problem where there's work sitting on someone's computer or folder or server somewhere that others don't have access to. So how do we take a software developer or open source mentality to knowledge work and apply it globally.
Putting in GitHub as a fundamental part of their technology base but then going beyond that, we can help them map what their internal processes look like.
I think we've stepped into the role of mapping what that looks like, of coming to us and wanting counsel on best practices and how to build it. We want to be seen as thought leaders.
So how do you take a step back and re-envision knowledge work as ultimately being data and information being manipulated in the same way you manipulate code? When a legal issue pops up, we're going to treat it like a bug in code. Instead of taking an approach where you have functions in the company that don't speak to each other sitting up in some lonely ivory tower.
Avalos first encountered how tools like GitHub could change how an organisation collaborates in his early days at the company.
My first a-ha moment was when deciding to create a legal repository in the same way developers have them for code. We had an issue where HR emailed me and said 'we've got a field trip and we're going offsite.' Every company I've ever been at which had a General Counsel or legal department had a rule that you weren't allowed to go offsite without signing a permission slip or legal waiver in the event someone got hurt.
One of my primary concerns was the culture drift – that three weeks after hiring its first attorney, suddenly this very innovative and future facing company is saying people can't leave the building without signing on the dotted line then people are going to say 'this company isn't what it used to be and the culture is starting to slip.'
So I said to HR, instead of taking this email, I've created this repository so why don't you copy and paste it and create an issue in the same way a developer would create a bug.
What I didn't anticipate happening was that within five minutes of the issue being created someone saw it and said, “I got asked to sign something when I went on an offsite six months ago – @heather should have it.” Heather came back with 'yes we had another staff member's brother who's an attorney write that.'
That staff member, who is in an entirely different part of the business then gets pulled into the thread. By the time I got pulled into the conversation ten minutes later there was a complete conversation and work history on an existing document that saved sixty to ninety minutes of writing something from scratch.
I was effectively crowdsourcing the legal function within the organisation.
From that experience, Avalos saw what he believes is GitHub's role in a knowledge driven organisation where finding and managing disparate sources of information is normally problematic.
That to me gets very exciting, being able to leverage the minds of hundreds of people in your organisation.
For me the two, three five year vision of the future is how do we start to revolutionise the way companies think about the work they are doing and how do we take the agile workflow from developers to general management.
Attracting talent becomes another benefit for organisations using tools like GitHub or Slack, believes Avalos. He also cites the benefits for governments and citizens as well in being able to consult and manage the development of legislation and public policy.
An open source project can be more secure and stable, just because of the number of different eyeballs looking at that code. So how do we bring that to the different kinds of knowledge work in the world.
To finish, Avalos makes a lofty historical comparison for the company's role in helping modern organisations manage their internal knowledge systems.
How do we demystify technology, now that we have twenty million people working on site I've heard GitHub described as the Library of Alexandria for code. To me that's limiting because we don't just have every book, we have every version, every mistake that's been made and corrected so now how do we leverage the data GitHub that no-one else? How do we take that and the community aspect and focus that on software development and make it more accessible.
My take
Avalos' ambitions for GitHub are certainly impressive and there is no doubt organisations need better knowledge management tools lest they get overwhelmed by data or left flat footed in a rapidly changing world.
However DevOps tools may not be the best for those tasks, particularly for people in corporate roles that have significant levels of compliance attached to them. Examples are legal, aspects of HR and accounting tasks.
My scepticism is somewhat tempered though by the changes faced by organisations as management becomes flatter and staff are increasingly required to collaborate across divisions. I also quite like the idea of a software equivalent of the Library of Alexandria, with a faithful public record of all our programming and management mistakes.