Yes. The most simple, boiled-down definition is that: collaboration. But how the f%&k do you do that?
You might say, "Oh I dunno, they'll just figure it out." But guess what? People have spent their entire lives trying to figure out how to get random teams to collaborate better. It's hard. It's harder than coding, harder than supporting an app in production. It's not something you get good at by just doing engineering and hoping for the best.
And that is the entire reason DevOps was invented. A bunch of engineers basically got together and said, "Shit. We need to collaborate better. And we've known that for a while, but it's just not happening. What can we actually _do_ to collaborate better, and produce better outcomes?" Over the past decade, there has been a lot of collaboration on how to do better collaboration. This topologies page is a very small example of what they've found.
I think that to engineers, DevOps can seem like a buzzword because there's all this stupid-sounding "business stuff" that people keep tacking onto DevOps. But the reason that happens is there are people whose job it is to help people collaborate better, and produce better outcomes, who have spent their lives working on these problems, and are trying to apply them to technology-related businesses. A lot of the things they've figured out are built on other things that have proven successful in the past, such as Lean manufacturing/software, Agile software development, and all the many other business strategies developed and practiced over the last century. Many companies, both large and small, have applied these ideas and seen real results from them.
> DevOps is just a buzzword.
"Cloud" is also a buzzword, as well as "Agile", but they are real things that real people use every day. Misunderstood? Absolutely; but definitely real.