American Airlines has always celebrated the diversity of its team members. Our IT department has weaved these values within our organizational culture. As March approached, we saw an opportunity to expand upon celebrating diversity with an emphasis on International Women’s Month. It started as an organic thought around taking an in-person celebration on International Women’s Day and pivoting it to a virtual effort.
Before we get started… There’s a very real chance that some of you won’t even finish this sentence before saying “too long; didn’t read” so here’s a brief summary to try and capture your interest:
TL;DR: American has been tiptoeing into the world of Open Source through our involvement in student hackathons and through our “lessons learned” from our InnerSource community.
Two years ago, our organization, Customer Technology, took the first steps in embracing a product mindset by restructuring our squads around our newly developed product taxonomy. This was a huge change for our teams and, as with any change of this magnitude, not everyone was on board.
Modernizing Our Infrastructure - Culture First Culture “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization” Merriam-Webster Transformations are hard but worthwhile endeavors. They require the right attitude, values, goals, and practices, all of which makes up a team’s culture.
DevOps leaders often like to talk about how important culture is as an aspect of transformation. It’s common to hear “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” At American, our delivery transformation efforts have been focused on culture from day one. We recognize how important culture is to every aspect of a thriving technology organization.
InnerSource is a fancy word to describe a simple concept –- the use of open source best practices to promote the sharing of knowledge, skills, and code inside an organization. Although a lot of these practices were already happening, our journey to create American’s InnerSource community started in earnest two years ago.
