Author: Mark Schwartz

As I said in my last post, the way we’ve looked at IT investments and budgets has been missing some crucial context. It’s the current state of IT, the “balance sheet,” so to speak, that determines what spending and investments are necessary when considered alongside the company’s strategic imperatives. A conversation between the CIO and […]

This guest post by Aaron Rallo touches on a topic that comes up frequently in my executive conversations and in my books: What is the value of agility and how can you assess it? Clearly, agility (flexibility, nimbleness, whatever word you prefer) has business value, since an agile business has less risk and the potential […]

It’s important for CIOs to be able to convey the current state of IT, particularly in conversations with their CFOs. I’ve written before about the CIO-CFO dialogue and how it should change in the digital age. In the past, CIO-CFO conversations have generally focused on budget planning and execution, or on multiyear capital planning. But […]

There’s a path to digital transformation for companies in every industry, including those that have strong traditions and are highly risk-averse. In this blog post, John Lucking, AWS Principal Solutions Architect, looks at the insurance industry. —Mark Guest post by By John Lucking, AWS Principal Solutions Architect In risk-averse industries like insurance, customers frequently ask […]

In this guest post, Doug Smith, AWS Americas Advisory Shared Delivery Practice Leader, and Prasad MK, Senior Advisory Consultant, talk about using the cloud to support platform and ecosystem models. As enterprises consider the new business models and strategies available to them in the cloud, many should consider these an option; platform and ecosystems have […]

In this guest post, Mignona Cote, the AWS Global Security Advisory lead, reports on her conversation with Jim Routh, Head of Enterprise Cybersecurity at MassMutual. Their discussion covers the challenges for CISOs who straddle the worlds of traditional information security and newer, digital. DevSecOps and cloud-based security paradigms. Ultimately, Routh says, CISOs must learn to […]

Sometimes we technologists can be a bit too clever for our own good. The term technical debt, attributed to Ward Cunningham in a 1992 OOPSLA conference speech¹, may be an example. We use the term often these days, generally in the context of justifying investments in nonfunctional aspects of IT; that is, investments intended to […]

We talk a lot about organizational agility. But what exactly does the term mean? By now, Agile software development and agile IT capability delivery have taken on a fairly precise meaning, even if it’s sometimes misunderstood. But one goal of IT agility is to support organizational agility, which is certainly a broader concept and more […]

In earlier blog posts I’ve talked about the CIO-CFO relationship, how it’s changing, and how it needs to change. In this post I’ll begin delving into what sorts of conversations should really be taking place between CFOs and CIOs and how the CIO can better frame these discussions. Must-Spending: The Historical Focus Beginning in, oh, […]

I’m excited to announce the publication of my fourth book, The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler. Despite the whimsical title, it’s about a critical concern of enterprises transitioning to the cloud and trying to thrive in the digital economy. From our meetings with enterprise AWS […]