Enterprise IT Roles

Understanding what drives those to whom we sell

Enterprise IT & their challenges

  • Digital Transformation - IT expected to enable faster delivery of customer led innovation.
  • Continuously deliver high quality end user experience - quality with speed.
  • Excessive complexity across IT architecture and infrastructure. Lack of full metrics and visibility across the entire process.
  • Compliance - prove compliance with IT controls and industry regulations.
  • Security - IT teams are under pressure to reduce risk, prevent and mitigate leaks.
  • Culture and collaboration issues in the workplace - legacy organizations and silos.
  • Budget constraints limit their options.

Related Reading:

Who cares about what? What pains do they have?

  1. CxO

    Key initiatives focused on (1) Digital Transformation (2) Moving to the cloud (cloud native) (3) Speed time to market without impacting risk

    Defining key trends and terms:

    • What is digital transformation - Read Forrester Digital Rewrites the Rules of Business (INTERNAL only)

    • Why is cloud native important to digital transformation

    • Speed time to market without impacting risk

      CIO or VP IT - Business focus, strategic, long-term, transformation, budget

      1. Persona reference: VP IT video, VP IT Slide Deck
      2. Value Prop:
        • GitLab’s single application enables more rapid development (see GitLab stats as an example) to meet time-to-market business challenges.
        • Unite workflows around a common tool to reduce friction and cost of IT.
        • Reduce or eliminate your costly DevOps tool chain (or avoid this investment in one).
      3. Resources:

      CISO and VP Security - Risk, Security, Compliance, protecting the business

      1. Value Prop:
        • You no longer must choose between velocity and risk.
          1. With GitLab, you can test ALL of your code, on every commit, automatically
          2. Because it’s not an incremental cost per app or per user (beyond using GitLab Ultimate for your entire SDLC), you can test every code change, not just critical apps or annual scans.
        • Better leverage your scarce security resources by putting app sec tools, that are meant for the developer, into the hands of the developer, so they may remediate more, earlier than possible with traditional app sec tools. (Enable TRUE shift-left via single application and single source-of-truth.)
          • Improve visibility while at the same time reducing friction between processes and tools used by dev and app sec teams.
      2. Resources:

      CTO - Technology focused, today and in the future. Focus can vary from company to company.

      1. Persona reference: Chief Architect Video, Chief Architect slide deck
      2. Value Prop:
        • GitLab’s single application enables more rapid development (see GitLab stats as an example) to meet time-to-market business challenges. It positions your enterprise for maximum flexibility and speed.
        • Unite workflows around a common tool to reduce friction and cost of IT.
        • Reduce or eliminate your costly DevOps tool chain (or avoid this investment in one).
        • Improve visibility while at the same time reducing friction between processes and tools used by development, operations, and application security teams.
      3. Resources:

  2. VP Level

    VP Apps/Development/Engineering - Helping to meet business demand for innovation, updates, and capability. This role is typically bonused/compensated on velocity, time to market and alignment with the business.

    1. Value Prop

      • GitLab’s single application that supports the entire DevOps lifecycle is of significant importance. The DevOps tool chain crisis is real and there is a lot of ‘bubble gum and duct tape’ going on in and around integrating all these point DevOps tools in order to convey the full story of what’s really happening.
      • Finding new areas across the SDLC to automate is top of mind to this role. GitLab’s Auto DevOps will be a competitive differentiator

    2. There are several critical challenges that application development leaders are facing.

    3. Resources:

    VP Ops - Keeping the business running efficiently. Uptime, recovery are important. The role is typically bonused/compensated on uptime and SLAs back to the business.

    1. Value Prop:

      • GitLab’s single application that supports the entire DevOps lifecycle is going to be important for this role. Shifting left monitoring, testing and security earlier in the SDLC is valuable to the VP Ops to reduce the risk of downtime in production. Auto DevOps will be of interest here as well.

    2. Resources:

    VP/Dir DevOps or Enterprise Architect - VP/Director of DevOps is a fairly new role. Enterprise Architect role is expanding with more and more control. Leading the execution of the transformation. Ensures the business and technology are in alignment. Focuses on best practices and processes as well as assists with documentation. Evangelist of DevOps best practices.

    1. GitLab persona reference: Director DevOps video, Director DevOps slide deck

    2. Value Prop:

      • GitLab’s single application enables more rapid development (see GitLab stats as an example) to meet time-to-market business challenges.
      • Unite workflows around a common tool to reduce friction and cost of IT.
      • Reduce or eliminate your costly DevOps tool chain (or avoid this investment in one).

    3. Resources:

    VP Security - Large enterprises will have this but others go straight to Manager of Security.

    1. Value Prop and Resources = see CISO

    VP Shared Svcs - Common services for IT (Project Mgt, Portfolio Mgt, Resource Mgt, perhaps QA, etc) - for enterprises with microservices model

    1. Value Prop - Project & Portfolio Mgmt, Testing (QA)
    2. Resources - future vision

    VP PMO / EPMO - Gathering and managing business projects/demand, execution, on-time, on budget

    1. Value Prop - Issues, issue boards, etc but of interest to their Directors
    2. Resources - future vision

  3. Directors

    1. Service Mgt - Service Desk, Incident mgt, responding to outages, recovery

    2. Release Mgt - managing change and configuration of the IT systems

    3. DevOps? - transformational role or maybe re-branded from ‘release mgt’

    4. “Business XYZ” - they own the applications for a specific business unit. Typically they own the outcome / business results of e investment. Manage demand, dev, delivery

    5. Portfolio Mgr/Director - manages a business unit’s portfolio of projects/initiatives. On-time, on budget

    6. Testing / QA - Quality and Testing - plan testing, provide resources, execute tests, track quality

    7. Security - establish policies, procedures, and processes to secure IT.

      • Application Security - a specialty within Security that focuses on finding and removing vulnerabilities in software.
      • Security Operations - may manage a Security Operations Center (SOC) or Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system or service to identify and correlate security events in order to prioritize threat risk. Seldom do they focus on application security.

    8. Risk and Compliance - usually reports separately from the IT org that may be creating the risks. May even report to CEO.

  4. Managers

    1. Dev Team Manager - leads development team for a specific business function/system
    2. QA Manager - Test Leads, Automated Testing, Performance Testing, Test Environments, Test Data. Traditionally the QA manager does not engage in application security testing.
    3. Project Manager - plan, organize, and execute projects so they deliver on time, on budget
    4. DevOps - Probably ‘release manager’
    5. Release - Running day to day release management, documenting changes, ensuring approvals, etc
    6. Incident / Service Desk - Responding to problems/incidents from end users, restoring service
    7. Configuration - ensuring the configuration of environments is documented, controlled and managed
    8. Application Security - a specialty within Security that focuses on finding and removing vulnerabilities in software. They establish policies, procedures, and processes to test application software for security vulnerabilities.

  1. For prospects not yet using GitLab, focus on:

    • CxO or VP - single app story. efficiency, time to market.

      Ask: Are you challenged by Digital Transformation? (e.g. moving to the cloud, DevOps, etc.) Are you wanting to speed time-to-market while balancing constrained resources?

    • Director or Manager - repository and CI/CD are best-in-class. Benefits of single application, less friction.

      Ask: are you trying to increase the velocity of your software development? Are you stitching together a diverse tool chain to manage your code repo, CI/CD, and more? Do you need modern tools to help you with modern architectures like containers and cloud?

  2. For prospects using GitLab, up-sell to Ultimate by focusing on:

    • Cxo (including CISO) or VP - test more of your apps to manage more risk without hiring additional /scarce security pros.

      Ask: Are you running security scans on all of your applications today? If not, do you worry about the risks? Do you wish you could find vulnerabilities earlier without adding security staff and costly security tools?

    • Director or Manager - test more apps without increasing cost of tools or security staff.

      Ask: How do you test applications for security vulnerabilities today? Are you testing ALL of your applications? Do you wish you could find vulnerabilities earlier without adding security staff and costly security tools? Are you wanting to ‘shift left’ but haven’t found tools that will truly help you do that?

Last modified November 4, 2024: Fix broken links (2eb0e162)
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