Tuesday, June 16, 2015

4.74 Degrees of Separation: Bill Higgins

I've always believed the most powerful element of social business is its power to create relationships between people who otherwise would've never met. After learning that Jessica Ramirez had named him as one of the most important people whom she'd met via Connections, it took Bill a matter of seconds to name who that person was for him.

 

Bill Higgin's Story:

 

Over the past several years I've studied and embraced DevOps culture and practices to help deliver better products to IBM customers. I wasn't the only one. As IBM increasingly moved its business to the cloud, many other engineers started embracing DevOps practices too. Using IBM Connections, a community of practitioners interested in DevOps naturally developed and through this social network, I started to find other engineers who were able to teach me new things through their experiences. One of the best contacts I made was an IBMer named Trevor Bodz. Even though we were far apart organizationally (Trevor in IBM Commerce, me in IBM Cloud)—and even though we worked at different sites (Trevor in Austin, me in Raleigh)—we began to share DevOps-related links and stories with each other through Connections. Before too long, I found myself connecting other IBMers with Trevor for DevOps insights.

 

In January, I visited our Austin Design Studio, and ran into Damion Heredia, who had taken over product management leadership for our developer technologies, which these days largely focus on enabling teams to use DevOps practices while building cloud applications and services on IBM Bluemix. Damion said that he wanted to hire a new technical product manager to develop a leapfrog strategy for DevOps. He said, “Ideally the candidate would have hands-on experience and work in Austin—ask around and see if you can find someone.” Damion started walking away and I said, “I found someone!” and told him about Trevor. Flash forward five months and Trevor has been killing it in his role as senior product manager for DevOps. Since then I took a leadership role on our internal DevOps toolchain effort, and together Trevor and I contribute to a joint roadmap for our commercial and internal DevOps strategy.

 

We're great partners today and it's incredible to think that without Connections, we may never have even heard of each other.

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