Devops is what we do.
I’m Mark W. Schumann. The Blue Herring methodology grows from my rather long career of implementing practical software solutions. Most recently I created the Blue Herring SaaS to make the ongoing monitoring part easy, repeatable, and effective.
That having been said, the methodology has been refined by cycles of implementation and harsh judgment; colleagues and clients are continually adding to the lore and to the solutions catalog.
The Blue Herring™ system is the latest thing to come out of my thirty years in the implementation business.
I started build-and-deploy work in roughly 1989 on an IBM System/38 mini… before that platform supported anything like version control. My colleague Mike had come up with a slick way to prevent the ten team members from overwriting each other’s changes and bug fixes; it had something to do with secretly renaming and locking program objects from a Command Language (CL) program that had elevated rights. We were devops before it was cool.
Bottom line, delivery is development. Code that can’t be deployed is equivalent in usefulness to code that hasn’t been written or code that doesn’t work.
Skipping ahead a couple of decades, my undergrad homie Dave Stagner started thinking out loud about a universal configuration change monitoring solution that hasn’t been done before. He called the concept “Congruence.” It was super slick, but I was the one who got around to implementing it on an Azure back end. A lot of what you’re seeing here is guided by Dave’s original vision.
I have seen your development kerfuffles before. Here’s a selection of my past clients:
- Ford
- FedEx Logistics
- Sherwin-Williams
- All the little kiosk stores at the Detroit Metro Airport (serious devops challenges there!)
- Nordson
- KeyBank
- Parker Hannifin Corporate Technology Ventures (brand new IoT network!)
- Cleveland Clinic
HQ Staff
Right: Mark W. “Poppy” Schumann
The four-step Blue Herring methodology, on the other hand, grows out of my own recent and sustained experience in industries as diverse as logistics, car washes, paints & finishes, and telemedicine. I keep seeing the same patterns again and again. The solutions are usually difficult—and they often involve telling people things they don’t like to hear—but they also tend to repeat themselves. The four steps are never not necessary.
But there’s more.
We have a junior UX person, access to LAMP deployment specialists (because I’m primarily .NET), and even consultants on consulting.
This is a new and different consultancy.
I will be your primary consultant throughout your Blue Herring proof of concept, analysis, and implementation. Integrating Blue Herring solutions with your enterprise will rely heavily on your existing teams, but the right outside specialists are at hand when we need them.
Sure, that’s a little bit bootstrappy. I trust that if what you wanted was McKinsey you wouldn’t be reading this now.