A friend pointed to Andrew Shafer’s post on developer ideas. in one of his slide decks he points to Westrum Typology. When I first saw it I thought it was Western Typology. No Westrum. Westrum who? looking it up Ron Westrum created the Westrum Typology. Has Ron written anything. One book. A book with 5 stars ratings on amazon.com. A book on how the Sidewinder missile was developed.

“In the mid-1950s a small group of overworked, underpaid scientists and engineers, working on a remote base in the Mojave Desert, developed a weapon no one had asked for but that everyone was looking for. Sidewinder is the story of how that unorthodox team at China Lake, lead by the visionary Bill McLean, overcame Navy bureaucracy and more heavily funded projects to develop the world’s best air-to-air missile.”

Got more curious after buying the book and wrote to Ron and asked him for other things to read. One of the paper’s Ron wrote was on information flow and its impact on safety.

“Not only is information flow vital to the organization’s ‘‘nervous system,’’ but it is also a key indicator of the quality of the organization’s functioning. “

“The important features of good information flow are relevance, timeliness, and clarity.”

“By examining the culture of information flow, we can get an idea of how well people in the organization are cooperating, and also, how effective their work is likely to be in providing a safe operation.”

Ron is 75 and has spent a long time studying organizations. It is interesting that the DevOps community has picked up on his Typology.

A DevOps book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations has a chapter with much of Ron’s ideas integrated.