The pandemic tested IT teams in entirely new ways and shed new light on the importance of taking care of employees’ very human needs in a difficult time. As former Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly recently wrote for the Harvard Business Review, that attention will shift to higher level needs like clarity, truth, connection, and growth.

Leading and managing teams may take more nuance in this remade work environment, so we’re recommending ten books to help you build stronger teams for the days ahead, from better understanding (and even celebrating) the very human nature of teams to fostering high-performing teams in distributed environments to making the shift from team member to leader.

Software is eating the world and open source has become the default way to build software. Public cloud has accelerated the proliferation of open source technologies, and has led to an adjustment in both the enterprise procurement and monetization of software. After a few years of seismic realignment (the aftershocks are still reverberating through the ecosystem), we have reached a point where there are paths for software vendors to partner with or live in the marketplaces of the hyperscalers, says Jerry Chen, a venture capitalist at Greylock. Chen has a long history with open source - he was on the VMware team that made Cloud Foundry an open source project, and later funded Docker as a VC - and has written a series of articles called Castles in the Cloud. I recently spoke with him as part of Red Hat’s livestreaming show, In The Clouds.

For any digital transformation project to succeed, you need a well-laid-out road map, a clear objective, and bite-sized goals to mark the milestones. And it’s important to put those plans into action and measure their success against the pre-defined relevant metrics.

The pandemic made the pace of digital transformation a key performance metric by making it urgent for enterprises to embrace and accelerate digital. Now it’s time to think beyond speed and measure the success of digital transformation against metrics that align with business goals.

Here are five key digital transformation metrics that hold value for enterprises across industries.

There are hundreds of thousands of tasks required to administer a large fleet of servers. Automation can take some of the more mundane tasks off your plate. As an example, once you have built your Standard Operating Environment (SOE) and need to manage the care and feeding of it, you may want to run this through an automation pipeline to get the grunt work done while you are focused on more critical tasks.

So let's look at automating the initial publication of our monthly content in Red Hat Satellite.

November brought a full plate of new features written by developers working at Red Hat, and we are here to share the harvest. Keep reading for some of our reader's top picks and a few we really like, including updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Beta and developer guides to choosing your best Java garbage collector, building machine learning models in the cloud, bringing Kubernetes workloads to the edge, and so much more.