How do you actually do DevOps? Here is a hint: stop fixating on finding the right tools or implementing the right processes. Instead, think about the broader ecosystem in which you operate, the culture that prevails in that ecosystem, and which parts of that culture you can borrow to accelerate your DevOps transformation.
This principle holds true regardless of which type of ecosystem you work in—even environments that depend in part on mainframes. As Rouan Wilsenach wrote on Martin Fowler’s blog, “Even with the best tools, DevOps is just another buzzword if you don’t have the right culture.” Culture is the foundation. Everything else is scaffolding.
Why Tools and Processes Are Not Enough
Tools and processes are undeniably a key part of DevOps. It is difficult to achieve continuous delivery without a continuous integration pipeline, automated testing, or a structured feedback loop. But tools and processes do not ultimately separate DevOps success from DevOps failure—they enable execution, not transformation.
The market is full of tools marketed as critical DevOps enablers. There is no shortage of articles explaining why practices such as shift-left testing or breaking down team silos matter. That guidance is useful, but it can create a misleading impression: that DevOps is simply a matter of adopting the right stack or restructuring a workflow.
If that were true, achieving DevOps would be trivial. The fact that organizations across every industry continue to struggle with it is evidence enough that the challenge runs deeper than tooling.
What DevOps Culture Actually Means
Culture, in the DevOps context, refers to the values and viewpoints that shape how a team approaches software delivery. Without the right cultural foundation, even the most sophisticated toolchain will fail to deliver results.
For example: if team members do not genuinely value collaboration and transparency, no continuous integration server or real-time communication platform will produce the cross-functional coordination that continuous delivery requires. If developers, testers, or operations engineers do not believe in the underlying goals, the tools will sit unused or be worked around.
While every organization’s situation is different, most DevOps practitioners recognize the following cultural values as foundational:
- Collective accountability. Every team member shares responsibility for ensuring software is delivered on time and meets expectations. Delivery is not the exclusive domain of any single role.
- Blameless post-mortems. The team as a whole owns the system. When things go wrong, the response focuses on learning and improvement rather than assigning individual fault.
- Radical visibility. All team members should have ongoing insight into what other members are doing, where work stands, and where bottlenecks exist.
- Automation over manual gatekeeping. DevOps prioritizes automating repetitive tasks rather than allowing individuals to protect territory by performing those tasks manually.
- Collaboration and shared roles. While individuals may have primary responsibility for certain areas, the culture should allow and encourage anyone to contribute to any part of the system.
- Management support. Leaders must embrace collective ownership of IT outcomes and give teams the autonomy to adjust tools and processes as the work evolves.
Your Ecosystem Shapes Your Culture
Culture does not develop in a vacuum. It is influenced heavily by external forces—by partners, vendors, customers, and the broader industry you operate within. This is why your business ecosystem is a powerful, often underused lever for cultural change.
When thinking about how to build a DevOps culture grounded in the values above, look beyond your internal processes and examine what the organizations you work with are already doing. In many cases, ecosystem partners who have gone through a DevOps transformation can help you accelerate your own journey by sharing what worked and what did not.
This does not mean you should look exclusively at organizations celebrated for being DevOps-native startups. Those businesses often had the advantage of building their culture and practices when DevOps was already mainstream. The more instructive examples are frequently established companies that have successfully modernized long-standing cultures—organizations that know what it takes to shift deeply embedded habits and integrate older technologies with modern delivery practices. These partners bring organic, battle-tested wisdom that a greenfield startup typically cannot offer.
A Practical Example: Mainframes in a Modern DevOps Ecosystem
Consider the challenge many large enterprises face: a hybrid infrastructure that combines modern, cloud-based platforms with mainframe systems. Conventional wisdom has long held that mainframes are incompatible with DevOps practices—too legacy, too siloed, too difficult to integrate.
This assumption is increasingly outdated. IBM, for instance, has developed tooling specifically designed to bring mainframe development into modern DevOps workflows. Tools such as Z Open Development allow teams to standardize source control and build processes on mainframes using Git-based tooling, consistent with the rest of a modern pipeline. Z Open Unit Test brings automated unit testing to mainframe applications. Z Development and Test Environment makes it possible to test and build mainframe applications on commodity x86 servers.
Integrating these tools is a technical step. But the deeper challenge is cultural: developers and ITOps engineers must move past the ingrained assumption that mainframes have no place in a modern DevOps shop. That assumption is not only inaccurate—it actively prevents organizations from building the unified, end-to-end delivery pipelines that DevOps promises. Discarding the misconception is as important as adopting the tooling.
Conclusion: Borrow Culture Deliberately
Succeeding at DevOps means cultivating the cultural principles that turn a toolset into a real workflow. The good news is that you do not need to develop those principles entirely from scratch. Your ecosystem—your partners, vendors, and peers—is a rich source of proven cultural patterns and practical experience.
Look beyond your own walls. Identify ecosystem partners with genuine DevOps experience, including those who have modernized traditional environments rather than simply built new ones. Learn from their cultural journey. Then apply those lessons to your own organization, adapting them to your specific context, technology stack, and team dynamics.
The tools will follow. Culture leads.