@gitlab-com/business-technology@gitlab-com/business-technology/enterprise-apps@gitlab-com/business-technology/team-member-enablement@gitlab-com/Finance-Division/procurement-teamUnlike a traditional IT department that is responsible for 80%+ of the infrastructure and software-as-a-service applications that team members use, we are directly responsible for less than 20% of the infrastructure and tech stack applications that are used across all of the departments at GitLab.
Our department focuses on managing the framework of how GitLab procures, implements, integrates, secures, exports analytics, and supports our tech stack applications while providing strategic enablement and integration support for all departments and team members that allows us to scale efficiently, SAFEly, and securely.
As we move from Foundation to Scale as a Business Technology organization, we will continue to take a fresh look at how we assess our application landscape and apply our heat map methodology.
In the past, it was a very simplistic view of capabilities and just looking at foundational platform implementations. As we enter the scaling era, we will need to look deeper into the foundational applications that have been deployed and prioritize ways to get more value. This needs to include enabling specific features, seamless integrations between systems, building more automation and enabling more mature business processes.
As GitLab has grown organically, several departments and functional groups have their own System Administrators ("System Owners") to handle day-to-day management of the tech stack applications that are specific to that department or functional group, within the framework of organization-wide compliance, infrastructure, and security best practices.
To support this "shadow IT" model, each tech stack application has a System Owner that is the DRI for handling the implementation and day-to-day operational support for the team members that utilize that application (in their department or functional group). This has an added benefit of preventing the traditional IT department from being a bottleneck and allows each department to self-service as part of GitLab's efficiency for the right group subvalue.
As a SaaS company, our Engineering division also has an infrastructure SRE team and security team that supports the GitLab product development and hosting of our GitLab.com SaaS service. Many of the technologies that we use overlap, so the Business Technology department focuses on the technologies that are used for running the business that usually are not directly related to product development or the hosting of our GitLab.com SaaS service.
Please create an MR if we missed a system owner team.
As department leaders and system owners identify technologies that GitLab should adopt, our Procurement team handles the strategic negotiation and purchasing of the licensing using a strategic sourcing approach that focuses on longer-term relationships with suppliers to drive value, quality, and industry collaboration to enhance competitive advantage.
If you're looking to buy technology for yourself, please see the handbook pages for expenses, home office equipment or buying software.
As new tech stack applications are introduced and/or integrated, our Enterprise Applications team helps to align and enable technologies with end-to-end business processes and custom integrations where needed for critical systems, particularly quote-to-cash finance and sales systems.
Each of our tech stack applications have a variety of useful data that can be accessed through the API and other data sources. The data team focuses on aggregating the data from many of our tech stack applications to provide powerful reporting to help team members and leaders make informed data-driven decisions faster with the richest dataset possible.
We encourage you to check out SiSense to get started with the dashboards that we have available.
The IT Security and Compliance team focuses on reducing the threat landscape and improving our security posture across our tech stack applications while ensuring privacy, data protection, and compliance framework requirements are met. We collaborate closely with the Engineering Security department that focuses on the broader scope of the GitLab product and our GitLab.com SaaS offering.
The best practices and policies for team members can be found on the security practices handbook page.
The IT Support team (aka Helpdesk or Team Member Enablement) focuses on providing helpdesk support for all of our team members globally with the technologies that are used across the entire organization. These include our collaboration tools (GitLab.com, Google Workspace, Slack, Zoom, etc.), security and compliance tools (1Password, Okta, Jamf, SentinelOne, etc.), laptops and hardware (MacBook Pros, Linux machines, etc.), and most software applications that run on MacOS.
You can ask for assistance in the #it_help Slack channel.
The IT Support team handles access requests for the tech stack applications that IT manages. All access requests are created in the same issue tracker project, regardless of which System Owner is responsible for provisioning your user account.
The IT Engineering - Access Management team focuses on Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) automation for all of GitLab's tech stack applications.
We are developing GitLab Access Manager (GLAM), a custom application that will replace access request Markdown issues and manual provisioning with a streamlined custom web UI and API integration with most of our tech stack applications for user and role provisioning.
The IT Engineering - Infrastructure team collaborates with the Engineering Infrastructure Reliability (SRE) and Infrastructure Security teams to provide Infrastructure Shared Services for all AWS, Azure, and GCP related requests and support across the organization. See the Infrastructure Standards handbook page to learn more.
Our focus is on organizational policy management, access request provisioning, and services that are outside of the Reliability Engineering scope of hosting the Gitlab.com SaaS service, such as the provisioning of demo/sandbox/test infrastructure for team members.
The Demo Systems provide an always-on shared sandbox environment for demo and experimental use cases that aren't intended for or supported on GitLab.com and don't need dedicated infrastructure to be provisioned for your use case.
The GitLab Sandbox Cloud, powered by HackyStack, automates the provisioning of AWS acccounts, AWS IAM users, GCP projects, and GCP users. This has allowed us to automate a large portion of our AWS and GCP access requests.
You can see all of our job families to learn more about the roles in our department. You can see our open positions at https://jobs.gitlab.com.
Strong teams are important in business. Business Technology has incorporated a few team-building exercises as an ongoing element of our culture. As a department, we aim to celebrate team spirit, collaboration fun and motivation.