DevOps is a culture where the roles which are responsible for creating, maintaining and operating software application organize themselves and collaborate in a manner to improve communication. Where a company organizes themselve into vertical teams to achieve this and pursue the following goals:

Get fast feedback from the market

Vertical teams should introduce feedback loops in the shape of frequent deployments and in turn will get valuable feedback from the customers.

Make teams autonomous

Vertical teams should minimize dependencies between them, shorten and improve transparency of the decision-making processes to become autonomous and empowered to act in flexible manner when faced with feedback and changing requirements.

Improve operations empowerment of the development teams

Infrastructure- and platform teams should improve operations knowledge of developers and provide automated self-service platforms to empower teams to deliver early, with minimal risk and frequently.

Enable teams to understand and fix security issues

Platform teams and potentially also infrastructure teams should provide teams with tools, knowledge and processes to identify security issues as early as possible and empower teams to fix them.

Improve scalability over teams

Vertical teams can act autonomously and take responsibility for the operation of their applications. Therefore more vertical teams can be introduced without affecting performance of other teams.

Misconceptions- what do you not consider DevOps to be?

DevOps is not a position
DevOps is a culture where the responsibility is clearly aligned to the vertical teams which develop and deliver the products and not to individuals outside of vertical teams. Remember that you want to improve autonomy, empowerment and scalability of vertical teams. Introducing a DevOps position is directly contrary to the idea of DevOps.

DevOps is not a team
DevOps is a culture where people work in an organized structure and provide clear service boundaries to ensure the autonomy of each individual team.

DevOps does not equate to NoOps
Operations know-how is required to support and empower the vertical teams but the responsibility of empowering vertical teams to become autonomous will be in the horizontal teams responsible for Infrastructure- and platform.

I hope that this my personal minds helps you to understand the nature of this amazing transformation in DevOps that is emerging as you read ;-)