Over the past 3 years, CWT flipped an 18,000-person enterprise upside-down, turning a travel company with some apps into a software vendor focused on travel. A brand-new product group brought together technologists across the company and around the globe for the first time.
18 months in, I joined to lead the DevOps transformation, aiming to speed time to value, improve customer experience, and increase collaboration. As part of that effort, needs quickly surfaced around areas like:
- accelerating development through open-source adoption,
- improving recruitment with open-source contribution, and
- incorporating inner-source approaches to increase quality and speed.
To make those shifts, we drove adoption of a series of new tools — especially around source code and chat. Additionally, I was able to piggy-back onto existing efforts to define an open-source policy, apply a product-centric mindset, and expand that perspective into a cross-functional open-source program office.
This talk will describe our journey toward open at CWT, how we determined priorities and solutions, how we built bridges and overcame hurdles, and ultimately how we skipped entire generations in moving toward a modern view of open source in the enterprise. Anyone working toward an open culture in their company could benefit from this talk.
