A bit over a year after DASA DevOps Fundamentals was launched to the market, I thought it would be a good time to take a step back and build an understanding of how the DASA idea has spread across the world.

Seth Godin is a respected author with some great ideas about the spreading of ideas.

Ideas spread if they are remarkable – awesome products, addressed at an audience that is keen to listen and willing to spread the word.

Seth Godin

What Makes DASA Remarkable

Remarkable means that people should be willing to make a remark about you or your product. In order for someone to make a remark about a product, its message must really hit home and touch people.

DevOps has been around for quite some time and as DevOps is a movement that inspires people to collaborate, communicate, and work together, initially there was a lot of resistance against professional certification. When DASA was being established, we looked at ways that would allow us to make it so remarkable that it would deal with these challenges and make people fall in love with it.

The open, membership-driven model is one of the two key things that are making DASA remarkable. DASA is inclusive, which means everyone who wants to contribute is able to do so. DASA allows you to contribute to a qualification program, write a paper, or run commercial training programs. This openness is well received in the market.

The second thing that makes DASA remarkable, is that we designed a Competence Model that makes it clear to organizations what competencies and skills really are needed to make a DevOps team successful. The qualification scheme, in turn, helps to build and validate these competencies and supports organizations in their transformation journey. This also resonates well, and it is exciting to hear people talk about this to others.

Offer Products to a Listening Crowd

The Netherlands typically is a first mover country when it comes to IT best practices and IT certifications. The same holds true for DASA – the first adopters of DASA came from the Netherlands, and after the Netherlands, DASA started expanding within Europe rapidly.

The IT training industry in Europe is competitive and many of the IT domains are quite mature. This means that training providers are keen to explore potential new areas, and so they have been quite receptive to DASA.

For this reason, the adoption of DASA and other programs like it picks up momentum in other geographies a bit later. However, once that momentum begins to build, the idea can spread very quickly. LATAM, North America, and Asia are developing fast, but Africa is still falling a bit behind.

For most economic models to work, there must be ‘demand’, and not only ‘supply’. This means the development of training providers in this area only makes sense if there are sufficient organizations buying into DASA, who are keen to adopt the DASA approach into their own organizations. Over the past 6 months, DASA has been collecting a wide range of case studies already and also has plans to develop more examples which demonstrate the value that is created within these organizations using the DASA DevOps model.

Now Is This Remarkable?

With a remarkable product, an excited audience and the word spreading further and further, an exciting future lies ahead of us. And as we have designed DASA to be an open and community-driven model, I hope that we can do this together, collaboratively!