Unify governance and reduce sprawl

In fast-moving engineering organizations, it's common for systems, tools, services, and teams to become scattered. Before adopting an Internal Developer Portal, many organizations use spreadsheets, wikis, and various documents to define standards across engineering teams.

You can use Cortex to reduce sprawl and unify governance:

• See your services, infrastructure, and teams in a live, always-accurate catalog.

  • This makes it easier to discover ownership, access documentation, and see dependencies, reducing the need for scattered spreadsheets, wikis, or tribal knowledge.

• Codify standards and track adoption through Scorecards and Initiatives, ensuring non-compliant services are identified and addressed, further reducing unnecessary sprawl.

• Automate and standardize common developer workflows, ensuring best practices are followed and reducing ad-hoc scripts or manual processes.

Drive and maintain unified governance in Cortex

Learn how to use Cortex features to reduce sprawl: Automate and streamline governance.

Learn about maintaining standards and continuously improving: Unified governance in action.

Example: Skyscanner's engineering excellence framework

Cortex customer Skyscanner struggled with overlapping excellence programs across the engineering organization, each measured differently and enforced ad hoc. With Cortex, they were able to replace that sprawl with a single, lightweight governance framework that scales:

• They defined clear maturity levels across Scorecards to align policy with business priorities:

  • "No level" means that an entity does not meet the minimum requirements to have the baseline levels. None of the rules are passing.

  • The "Baseline" level contains rules for non-negotiable production standards.

  • The "Mature" level builds on top of the baseline, containing rules for best practices. This is the level where they aim for entities to be.

  • The "Advanced" level rules meet all requirements of production standards. These rules are considered the "above and beyond" for engineers who want to be on the leading edge with their owned entities.

• They centralized all standards into a unified Scorecard

• They built a self-service Workflow for proposing, refining, and retiring standards without slowing innovation

Outcome

They went from managing 200 markdown files to having 15 consolidated Scorecards in Cortex that automatically measure their organization's top priorities.

See the IDPCON session

Skyscanner's Principal Software Engineer, Alex Williams, spoke at IDPCON to explain how their organization unified governance with consistent frameworks in Cortex: