Author: Mark Schwartz

When I joined AWS just over a year ago, I was introduced to the concept of a “bar raiser.” In every interview process for a new employee, someone is designated as the bar-raiser—the person who will make sure that the new employee raises the bar for whatever function they will be performing. The bar raiser […]

In previous blog posts I have described anti-patterns of enterprise IT that we often observe in enterprises we work with, and patterns of successful enterprise IT that are their antidotes. To make these patterns and anti-patterns more concrete, I will explain how they have played out at my old organization, US Citizenship and Immigration Services […]

An interesting question arose at one of my customer meetings recently. We were discussing the importance of innovation; in particular, how important it was for technology staff to stay abreast of new technologies to see whether they could add value to the enterprise. We agreed that current best practices suggest conducting rapid experiments to test […]

Enterprise leaders often ask us how to get started in digital transformation. The question usually comes after a discussion about the urgency of transformation and what a transformed enterprise looks like—the benefits of transformation and the business models it enables. At first, the journey seems long and involved; the changes dramatic and far-reaching. We often […]

In the last post we talked about anti-patterns that often get in the way of enterprise digital transformation. In this post we’ll cover some good patterns. We call them Shrink, Strangle, Confirm, Cohere, Omit, Shorten, and Embed. Pattern 1: Shrink Reduce the size of deliverables. Make large projects into small projects. Reduce the amount of […]

When I decided to move US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) into the cloud, I had a number of discussions with others in the federal IT community about cloud security. As the Authorizing Official—the person who had to sign off on the security of each system—for a component agency of the Department of Homeland Security, […]

Our Enterprise Strategy team meets with many hundreds of enterprise customers every year. We are able to see patterns in their digital transformations—ways of practicing and thinking about IT that work, and ways that don’t. In this post I will discuss some of the anti-patterns we encounter—IT mental models and traditional behaviors that just don’t […]

Working in the cloud is not just a matter of reducing costs once when you migrate your workloads. It is a matter of constant adjustment to gain all of the cost benefits that AWS makes available to you. We call this process cost optimization—the active oversight of costs as your organization and its market change, […]

  On July 2, I began a series of blog posts for CFOs interested in digital transformation. In this post, I’ll summarize where we are with the series. In researching and writing these posts I have learned a great deal about what CFOs are focused on, and I have realized that there are still a […]

You might say that humility is the essence of digital transformation. In the digital world, we are willing to be surprised and to learn. In the old days, we relied on a plan—prepared in advance—to guide our activities. The plan was made by someone, or some collection of someones, who knew enough to specify what […]