Author: Mark Schwartz

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 […]

The time has passed when CFOs could focus only on cost control and financial reporting. A company’s finance function, in the digital world, is a driver of competitive advantage, of strategy, and of innovation. In a competitive environment, the winner will be the company that best acquires financial resources, invests those resources in the right […]

By Erin Carlson, AWS Product Marketing Manager Introduction by Mark Schwartz One of the advantages of the cloud is that it allows you to right-size your infrastructure continuously—to add infrastructure when you need it and release infrastructure and stop paying for it when you don’t. This gives enterprises new degrees of freedom in managing their […]

*Note: this post is not intended as accounting advice. It is about how to structure IT investments and make decisions about them, not how to account for them. Do IT projects have the characteristics of capital investments? I am not talking about their accounting treatment—that is outside my area of expertise. I am asking from […]

Over the last two decades, the IT profession has developed new ways of working that are intended to deliver better business value more quickly and at lower risk. Or as Jonathan Smart of Barclay’s likes to say, “Better, Faster, Safer, Happier.”[1] There are buzzwords associated with these techniques, of course, as with everything in IT—in this […]

One strategy for enterprises looking to monetize their data and services is to offer an Application Programming Interface (API). This strategy has been used successfully in a range of companies, in industries including travel and – surprisingly, perhaps – banking. AWS offers a number of tools that can help not just in creating and operating […]

Many of our large enterprise customers have this worry hanging over their heads … what are they going to do about that mainframe when they migrate? Workloads designed specifically for the cloud tend to focus on horizontal scalability – that is, as they need more and more processing power, they can add compute instances to […]

Today’s digital transformations pose a number of challenges, or certainly major changes, for finance professionals in enterprises. Yet finance is a critical player in these transformations and in the “transformed” enterprise. Enterprises must make decisions about what IT and digital capabilities to invest in, how to fund and account for those capabilities, how to budget […]

Transformations can be driven from all parts of an organization. What’s essential is passion, commitment, vision, and a willingness to take on challenges. Driving a substantial transformation in an established enterprise is difficult whether the change agent is in a senior role, somewhere in middle management, or a hands-on implementor: a software developer, infrastructure engineer, […]

In earlier posts in this series, I talked about the challenges and techniques of driving change from a senior position in the organizational chart (Driving Change from the Top Down: Wielding Organizational Powerand Top-Down Transformation: Shu-Ha-Ri to Go Beyond Command-and-Control) and from a middle management position (Transforming Up and Down: Leading Change from the Middleand […]