Author: Mark Schwartz

Many companies have found that a cloud center of excellence (CCOE) can accelerate their migrations to the cloud and broader digital transformations. These CCOEs take many forms, which is appropriate because each company has unique challenges to overcome. Nevertheless there are certain patterns and antipatterns for using a CCOE. In this blog post, I’ll try […]

It’s the job of senior enterprise leaders to ensure that their organizations are ready for the future. Unfortunately the future is unclear to us—all the more so in this era of rapid change, uncertainty, and complexity. As with the weather, we can foresee the near future with some certainty, but as we look further ahead, […]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A company wants to transform to meet the future. The transformation is necessary; without it, they will be threatened by disruptive competitors or unable to serve their customers. But they can’t get started on the transformation because their employees are busy with their day-to-day jobs. Transforming requires effort. […]

There’s something problematic about planning for resilience. On the one hand, we know it’s necessary. If the COVID pandemic taught us nothing else, we learned that unexpected major disruptions can and will occur. And those disruptions will involve not just technology but, in some cases, business processes, personnel, communication, and even the fundamental market characteristics […]

Assume with me that the digital world is a world of fast change. Organizations need to excel at responding quickly to those changes—that’s what we call agility or nimbleness. When it comes to technology, we have well-understood ways of increasing agility and making technology delivery processes lean. Organizations worldwide and in all industries are moving […]

I wonder if we’re overlooking an important implication of AI and generative AI for the future of the enterprise. If, as seems to be the case, many employees will use generative AI applications to assist them and interactively support their work, then a new style of work is emerging. Success for an employee will mean […]

We’ve all been busily transforming for the last few years. Now there’s this big AI thing. How does it relate to the rest of our transformation? Should we be changing or rethinking our transformation plans? The easy answer is no, but there are some subtleties. We transform to increase our agility in the face of […]

You’ve taken your company in a new direction; the impact is a 10% growth in year-on-year revenue. Your new marketing program has increased leads by 5%. Your telecom costs have decreased by 5% because of your successful negotiations. Measuring results is an important part of our business lives. But measurements are meaningless without context, and […]

It won’t surprise you to hear that there’s been lots of excitement and speculation about generative AI in our meetings with AWS customer executives lately. The question on their minds is: “What does this mean for my business?” That’s a good way to frame the question; it’s not about what generative AI can do, but […]

In the digital world, formerly discrete activities have become continuous. In the old world of IT, software deliveries were considered discrete events. We created projects to deliver software capabilities, set requirements for them, deployed code, and then moved on to the next project. At least that was the theory. We knew those IT systems would […]