One trend for many organizations is to be data-driven. This means using data to make decisions at all levels, or at least support those decisions. This was popularized by many companies, and there is research to back up the claims that those organizations who do this have more success, more revenue, more profitability, etc. Much like DevOps, however, it seems many organizations don't want to actually invest in making data-driven decisions.

Instead, many opt to make decisions by HIPPO. If you've never seen this acronym, it stands for highest paid person's opinion. Many managers will defer to whoever is above them in the org chart, often someone that is paid more money than them. Even when there is data to make a different decision, the HIPPO is still used.

It's not just management. I sometimes see technical people do this. In that case, it might be the loudest or most senior person rather than the highest paid, but the sentiment is the same. Rather than using a lot of information, someone makes a decision based on what they want/see/need/desire. I've seen this often with tooling, where one person likes Jenkins (or hates it), and the organization changes from  (or to) Octopus Deploy or Bamboo for no real reason. Lately, it seems some people are advocating moving from Azure DevOps to GitHub Actions because, well, I don't know why. There's not a good rational reason.

The goal of collecting and using data is to do so intelligently and with purpose. And not just for big decisions, but for everyday actions. By senior managers and frontline people, to help guide a more efficient and effective company. This involves a lot of technical work, but also cultural change. We have to position data as a strategic and tactical asset that everyone shares and uses as the basis to make the entire organization better.

Of course, these are similar to the concepts of DevOps. Let's build software better. In practice, many attempts succeed initially but fail later as more and more groups fight individual incentives that promote one group's goals over another's. When silos aren't broken down, we fall back into the same patterns.

In this case, listening to (or lobbying) the HIPPO.