Author: Mark Schwartz

Welcome to the second installment of our series “Ahead in the Cloud,” where we interview leaders of IT transformation about what drives them and how they think about their roles. This installment features Peter Loeffler, VP of Innovation and Industry Affairs at Siemens Switzerland Ltd. If you want to hear more about how Siemens is […]

In an earlier blog post, I discussed the importance of building a culture of security rather than thinking of security as just the job of the CISO’s team. In this post, I’d like to discuss some ideas on how to build such a culture, drawing on my experiences at USCIS. As CIO, I was the […]

  In an earlier post, I described how a transformational leader who is not at the top of the organizational hierarchy can still begin the process of driving change. I left off my description at a critical moment. The change agent has implemented changes within his or her scope of authority, carved out a sandbox […]

In several earlier blog posts, I discussed techniques for leading a digital transformation from the top of an organization. In the first of these posts, I discussed how to take organizational power—the power that comes from sitting high in the organizational chart—and, in an ironic twist, use it to lead the organization from a hierarchical, […]

It is no longer sufficient to leave security to a team of specialists who watch over the enterprise’s risk posture and control it through a set of constraining policies. It is not enough to guard the boundaries of the enterprise’s network with firewalls, or to simply implement sets of controls specified in a compliance framework. […]

In an earlier post, I talked about how risk decisions are often compromised by the status quo bias. In this post, I would like to present an alternative way to think about risk—a way that fits well with today’s business practices. To be precise, I want to try to demonstrate that risk in a business […]

    If your enterprise is undertaking a transformation, then you will need to help your employees develop new skills. That makes sense—your employees are probably very good at doing whatever you have done in the past, and transformation, by definition, is something new. You could bring in new employees who already have the new […]

In a previous blog post, I talked about how to drive top-down change in an enterprise, and how to take advantage of command-and-control authority even in an Agile setting. In this post, I’ll talk about a particular technique that draws on authority. It is the change management approach called “Shu-ha-ri,” a concept drawn from the […]

One of the joys of being part of AWS is that of seeing the innovative and inspiring ways that our customers are using the cloud and driving transformations within their organizations. And these are simply two sides of the same coin: the cloud is enabling new ways of doing business; the practice of management and […]

When it comes to digital transformation, every enterprise is different. There is often a change agent (or a set of change agents) with a vision, a knowledge of good practices, a sense of urgency, and the energy to battle impediments. The change agent(s) may be anywhere in the organizational structure: high, low, or—in a typical […]