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"A leader’s biggest challenge is not a wrong decision; it’s hesitating to make a decision."
-- Ishit Vachhrajani
Getting to know
Ishit Vachhrajani, AWS Enterprise Strategist
Ishit's AWS experience
As Global Head of Enterprise Strategy, Ishit leads a team of former customer CxOs of large global organizations. Ishit’s team works with enterprise leaders worldwide to help them on their cloud journey, sharing their own experiences and strategies for increasing agility, driving innovation, and creating more customer-centric operating models. Ishit joined AWS in 2019, drawn by Amazon’s unique culture and the opportunity to work with the diverse set of seasoned leaders that make up the AWS Enterprise Strategy team.
Ishit's beginnings
Before AWS, Ishit spent the majority of his career in technology leadership positions with companies like A+E Networks, NBCUniversal, and GE. As Chief Technology Officer at A+E Networks, he led a major transformation of the technology function moving to the cloud, breaking down silos, and reorganizing the team for agility. He led a complete revamp of the core revenue products including global content sales and advertising sales, successfully integrated several international acquisitions, implemented global financial and HR platforms, and built an industry-leading data analytics platform. Ishit and his team also created AI-driven products to solve tough challenges around content discovery and monetization. He now shares his experiences in driving transformation, and his lessons on what worked (and what didn’t), with AWS customers to help them accelerate their own journeys.
Ishit's AWS goals
One frequent topic of conversation with customers is how to accelerate their transformation. Ishit encourages leaders to start now, start small, then pivot and make adjustments along the way. Ishit believes that people learn best by doing, not by planning. While planning is important, overthinking can stand in the way of progress. He also advises customers that adopting cloud is not an end goal in and of itself. Cloud goals need to be based around the outcomes that cloud enables—like launching a new product or reaching customers in a new way.
Ishit's leadership passions
Ishit is passionate about building high-performing teams, mentoring, and growing the next generation of leaders. He encourages executive teams to focus on their people. Succeeding at large transformational efforts requires building teams with a diversity of ideas and skills that can adapt with the ever-evolving customer needs.
Equipping new leaders goes beyond skills—it’s also about the right mindset. For example, Ishit has observed (in himself and others) that one of the biggest barriers to progress is indecision. To get past that barrier, and overcome fears of the unfamiliar, he advises leaders to be decisive and to recognize the difference between decisions that can be easily reversed and those that can’t.
Ishit's extracurricular activities
Outside of work, Ishit and his family share a passion for discovering new places, often hitting the road on the weekends and determining their destination as they go along. He applies the same principle of discovering the unknown to his cooking, noting that his favorite recipe is, “Whatever I have never made before.”
Ishit's career
Former roles
Global Chief Technology Officer, A+E Networks
VP, Global Products, Applications & Data Analytics, A+E Networks
Commercial Innovation Data & Integration Leader, NBCUniversal
Education
Executive Leadership Development Program, NAMIC, University of Virginia Darden School of Business
BS, Engineering, Instrumentation, and Control, Nirma Institute of Technology
Interests
Change management
Organizational design
Emerging technologies
Media & Entertainment
AI/ML
Data Analytics
Podcasts
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A conversation with Jonathan Allen, Director, Enterprise Strategy, AWS, Ishit Vachhrajani, Director, Enterprise Strategy, AWS, Clarke Rodgers, Director, Enterprise Strategy, AWS
Cutting-edge tools and technology without the right talent have little value. The engineer skillset must change as rapidly as the technology in order to remain relevant. Building a culture of innovation and creating an environment that provides growth for individuals and teams is crucial to successful transformation. Hear from three seasoned AWS executives who have successfully built and led technology teams as they share their experiences and strategies to help organizations navigate their cloud transformation journeys.
A conversation with Jonathan Allen, Director, Enterprise Strategy, AWS Ishit Vachhrajani, Director, Enterprise Strategy, AWS Clarke Rodgers, Director, Enterprise Strategy, AWS
While cloud adoption may bring speed and agility into the business growth equation, there are also numerous risks and challenges that must be addressed. Balancing momentum and disruption is an ongoing struggle for executives attempting to transform their companies. Hear from three seasoned AWS enterprise strategists who have successfully led organizations through change as they share their experiences and strategies to help organizations navigate their cloud transformation journeys.
A conversation with AWS Enterprise Strategists Jake Burns, Bryan Landerman, and Ishit Vachhrajani
This week AWS Enterprise Strategists Jake Burns, Bryan Landerman, and Ishit Vachhrajani tackle the question: "Is there a one-size fits all cloud strategy?". Leaders wonder, can I use a per-defined or templatized cloud adoption strategy? Can something like this exist? Listen in to hear Jake, Ishit, and Bryan answer these questions and share their advice for leaders as they begin their AWS Cloud journey.
Internet was the future and the dot-com boom was just around the corner. I had just landed a job as a developer before I even graduated. I was looking forward to learning Java, working on some e-commerce projects, and being a part of the next dot-com success story. Optimism was in the air. Then, on my first day on the job, I was assigned to a batch of COBOL trainees!
As a developer fresh out of school, the first two service level agreements (SLAs) that I was accountable for were on-time delivery (OTD) and first time right (FTR). While the intention of the first time right measure was to reduce rework and prevent defects from flowing down the line, it also resulted in long planning cycles, reams of paper used for requirement gathering, and formal sign-offs from the “business” as if IT was an external vendor. Fortunately, I grew out of that measure, adopting a more incremental and experimental Agile approach. However, on-time delivery has been a harder one to shake off—I am still working on it!
ne of the challenges many enterprise leaders face is how to experiment and quickly create business value from machine learning without establishing large teams with specialized skillsets and infrastructure. As a CTO, I found that having access to Amazon Web Service’s pre-trained AI Services enabled our developers, even those with no prior machine leaning experience, to build AI-driven applications quickly. Even more empowering personally was how easily it allowed me and other senior leaders on the team with somewhat rusty hands-on coding experience to experiment and think about meaningful use cases. This is where AI has tremendous power to unlock business value in every industry, not just by lowering the cost of entry, but also by making it accessible to all skill levels within the enterprise.