Author: Mark Schwartz

Given today’s economic uncertainties, many companies are focused on ways to reduce—or at least control—their costs. Their approaches are often based on the traditional idea of controlling costs through the mechanism of budgets. “Let’s find places to cut a budget and force the manager working with that budget to find savings.” Often, the easiest areas […]

Given the increasing interest in ESG we are seeing among customer executives, we thought this blog post by AWS Senior Customer Solution Managers Hari Venkata and John Roberts would be useful. – Mark Seven-step roadmap for CEOs and CFOs who are embarking on sustainability reporting journeys. Hari Venkata (Sr. Customer Solutions Manager ISV), John Roberts […]

We often recommend that enterprises have a clear idea of what they hope to accomplish by moving to the cloud. They can then set up success measures that will both guide them and allow them to measure their progress. In this blog post, Nurani Parasuraman discusses how best to track the effectiveness of cloud adoption.  […]

In this post, John Naylon draws an interesting connection between multi-cloud strategies and outsourcing. I won’t steal his thunder by saying any more! Mark Complexity, interchangeability, and partnership in outsourcing  What do emptying the office wastepaper baskets and manufacturing iPhones have in common? Perhaps not much on first inspection. However, these are both tasks which […]

How do you know whether you’re successful in your cloud journey and your digital transformation? Or, when you’re planning your digital initiative, what benefits should you expect and how will you see them reflected in the company’s performance? Given the uncertainty and change in today’s business environment, it’s sometimes hard to find a stable baseline […]

Four Steps Toward Digital Government Many of the challenges that governments face in their digital transformations are common in private sector entities as well. But government agencies are constrained in ways that make it more difficult to address those challenges. When I was the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Department of […]

We’re taught as managers that rigorous analysis and due diligence are a critical part of our jobs. There’s certainly comfort in spending the time to deeply analyze decisions before we make them. I don’t mean to question that received wisdom, just to point out that there’s a trade-off. Good managers need to do “the right […]

Many enterprises have already become proficient with the cloud. They’ve migrated a substantial portion of their workloads, learned the necessary cloud skills, established an aggressive security posture, and developed at least an initial workable operating model. What’s next? How do you build on that foundation to maximize the value of the cloud? Here are some […]

Overview Throughout the year, we write blog posts on whatever topics seem to be most important to the AWS customer executives we speak to. Each of us on the Enterprise Strategy team holds 100-200 customer meetings a year, generally at the most senior executive levels, to try to help with their challenges in digital transformation—cultural […]

“Shadow IT” or “Rogue IT”—I’d venture to say that all IT organizations experience it. It’s tempting for different parts of the business—when they feel that IT isn’t meeting their needs as quickly as they’d like—to find other ways to get things done. The problem is that they might be bypassing important security or availability controls, […]