What Is SRE?

Chapter 2. Understanding the SRE Role

Culture/Capabilities/Configuration

In Innovation Prowess (Wharton Digital Press), George S. Day, a business professor at Wharton, identified a framework for the underlying components in highly innovative companies. He classified them into the “three C’s”:

• Culture. An organisation’s shared values and beliefs, defining appropriate and inappropriate behaviours. It is often summed up simply as “the way we do things around here.”

• Capabilities. The combination of skills, technology, and knowledge that allows the firm to execute specific activities and innovation processes.

• Configuration. The structure of the organisation, including how resources are allocated, who bears responsibility for achieving targets, and how success is measured.

Day explores the ways in which these components support each other to enable ongoing innovation practices that persist through both success and failure. While Day was focused on the aspects that lead to innovation, these same dynamics apply to reliability. Adapting his points:

It takes sustained leadership and the long-run commitment of finance and human resources to build [reliability] prowess. Success begets success: Prowess improves the more it is applied….

[The] elements are mutually reinforcing. They don’t simply add together; instead they are multiplicative, as a weakness in one afflicts the others….

Culture underlies and infuses everything an organization does….Culture and capabilities have a symbiotic ...