AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

Mark Schwartz

Author: Mark Schwartz

Mark Schwartz is an Enterprise Strategist at Amazon Web Services and the author of The Art of Business Value and A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility. Before joining AWS he was the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Service (part of the Department of Homeland Security), CIO of Intrax, and CEO of Auctiva. He has an MBA from Wharton, a BS in Computer Science from Yale, and an MA in Philosophy from Yale.

Context view

Measuring Success: A Paradox and a Plan

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 […]

GenAI for Business

What Will Generative AI Mean for Your Business?

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 […]

Continous Improvement

Continuous Engagement and Innovation

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 […]

Decision

Should You Prioritize?

Sometimes an idea becomes so ingrained in conventional wisdom, such an embedded assumption in everything we do, that it demands to be questioned. Think about how often you hear someone in a meeting say, “We need to prioritize,” or ask, “Is this a priority?” When something goes wrong, it may be blamed on a failure […]

Cutting Costs by Cutting Waste

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 […]

Sustainability

Seven-step roadmap for CEOs and CFOs who are embarking on sustainability reporting journeys

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 […]

Measuring effectiveness

Tracking the Effectiveness of Cloud Adoption

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.  […]

Partnership

Complexity, interchangeability, and partnership in outsourcing

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 […]

multiple tape measures - signifying multiple areas that comprise cloud transformation

Measuring the Success of Your Transformation

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 […]

Steps via the Journey pic

Four Steps Toward Digital Government

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 […]