15 What Are Innovators Doing Well? 01 Learning from the tech industry. As technology becomes more vital to non-tech companies, innovation can stall without a fundamental change in attitudes to building software. Adopting engineering-driven software operations methodologies from organizations that operate entirely in the cloud—continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/ CD), code reviews, unit and integration testing, source control, build systems, incremental rollout, reliability engineering, blameless post-mortems4, and others—accelerates payback while helping innovation to stay on track. A key reason the tech industry builds software more effectively than other industries is their adoption of these practices. Tech industry leaders understand that while following these practices may slow down new code development in the short-term, it significantly reduces time spent on code maintenance down the road. As a result, these practices free people with valuable technical skills to continue to innovate. Cloud native technologies, such as Kubernetes and other “infrastructure as code” offerings enable these best practices more effectively than their on-premises counterparts. Tech companies are also further along in adopting a “training first” or “lifelong learning” attitude. A few weeks of training can save months of ramp-up time and help to keep an organization up-to-date with the fast-changing world of cloud, 5 especially in new managed services. According to McKinsey , adapting to changing technology by finding new people every nine to 18 months who bring new skills isn’t enough: “There is a kind of Moore’s law at work, in which the capacities of these information tools are doubling every couple of years or less.” Continued training is also seen as more and more important to tech workers, who are coming to expect their employers to invest in keeping them current. 4https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/postmortem-culture/ 5https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights putting-lifelong-learning-on-the-ceo-agenda