Author: Mark Schwartz

I am often asked a question along these lines: Mark, I get that Agile and DevOps approaches favor learning and adjusting over rigidly following a plan. But our budgeting process locks in our spending (and therefore our annual plan) in advance, and our investment management process necessarily locks in spending levels and schedules for each […]

by John Brigden, VP of AWS Managed Services Introduction by Mark Schwartz In the digital world, speed is all-important. Short lead times allow companies to get products to market faster; build their products in fast, low-risk increments that incorporate customer feedback; respond quickly to disruption; and reduce risk through rapid customer testing and timely response […]

Operations in Mind: Building Amazing Stories by Design by James Windsor, Business Development Manager (ANZ), AWS Managed Services (AMS) introduction by Mark Schwartz, AWS Enterprise Strategist In this guest post, James Windsor from AWS Managed Services (AMS) talks about working backwards from a vision of what you want your organization to be, to make decisions […]

We hear a lot of talk these days about digital transformation. Enterprises see that they need to take advantage of new digital technologies and management techniques to become nimbler and to deepen their relationships with customers. Their technology now looks antiquated compared to the digital services they use every day; their processes seem slow compared […]

by Vieng Soukhavong, Global Sentinel Ops Leader, AWS Managed Cloud Introduction by Mark Schwartz, Enterprise Strategist This is the second post in our series from Amazon Managed Services (AMS), presenting what they have learned about operating effectively in the cloud. An important principle in the cloud and DevOps world is to design for operations. Code […]

Sometimes I think IT leaders are missing a key point in the way they speak to their non-technology counterparts. Case in point: we keep saying things like, “The company has to be more comfortable taking risks,” or “We have to fail fast,” or “We need to be less risk-averse.” I can guarantee that none of […]

by Sid Arora, Sr. Product Manager, AWS Managed Services and Vieng Soukhavong, Global Head of Operations for AWS Managed Services introduction by Mark Schwartz, Enterprise Strategist Our Amazon Managed Services (AMS) group operates customer workloads in the cloud. It has learned a great deal from doing so and has devised innovative solutions for achieving high levels of reliability […]

The roles of the CFO and CIO have been subtly changing. In many enterprises, these roles had veered away from the strategic focus that one would expect from CXOs. But to succeed in the digital world, as I discuss in my book War & Peace & IT, enterprises must let their CIOs and CFOs re-establish […]

by Barb Malik, Principal Tech Delivery Manager, AWS Managed Services Introduction by Mark Schwartz Lift and Shift? Or refactor as you shift? This question comes up often in our conversations with enterprise leaders. To make the most of the cloud, legacy applications would need to be updated to take advantage of the cloud’s unique capabilities—become […]

In my previous post I talked about the presumed challenge of the “frozen middle”—the middle managers who seem to resist transformation even when both the leaders of the organization and the hands-on executors want to see it happen. In that post I discussed the changing role of middle management and the critical role middle managers […]