I've seen much smaller organizations fail to adopt "DevOps"; pretty much textbook against the recent "Puppet yearly state of Devops report": cultural issues, an

I've seen much smaller organizations fail to adopt "DevOps"; pretty much textbook against the recent "Puppet yearly state of Devops report": cultural issues, and legacy software. It boils down to the organization SAYING they want to make this transition, and not doing what's necessary to change. "Sufficiently empowered" is a nice blanket term, but it's not always that easy. At my previous job, the "cultural" issue was specifically 3 individuals, who were highly placed in the organization, and they were #1, #3 and #5 employees from when the company was originally a startup. Nobody, not even the CEO, was "sufficiently empowered" to tell these fully-vested founders how to do their job or run their teams. When it came down to it. And they prevented a company of 500 others from succeeding at changing how they did the work. Now; we did hire a very good devops-oriented cloud architect, who was making a lot of progress, despite the resistance, and he may actually succeed (keyword: "strangler pattern"), but they're already 5 years into this effort. So; indeed, the size of the USAF, AND all the contractor developers they depend on, and the command-structure of this combined "organization"; I wouldn't want to contemplate the level of "sufficiently empowered" that would be required to change that in 6 months. You'd have to summarily fire a LOT of people, and magically find skilled replacements, and then magically overcome the knowledge gap, while maintaining operational readiness for warfighters.