Author: Mark Schwartz

If you’ve been doing something for a while, and now you change course, is that an admission that the way you were doing it before was a mistake? If you’ve spent a lot on something, should you toss it out when something better comes along? If your budget is full of “keeping the lights on” […]

I was talking to the executive team at one of our enterprise customers recently when this connection suddenly hit me. Someone on the team had asked a question along the lines of “How can you organize the activities of autonomous teams so that you can trust them to work on the right things?” An easy […]

We’ve learned from COVID-19 that in a crisis, enterprises quickly have to focus on getting their employees working again. It’s the chief prerequisite for reestablishing business operations. After all, how can your employees respond to the crisis if they can’t work? In an earlier post I pointed out that agility, or nimbleness, is the essential […]

Sometimes, other leaders in your company reject your ideas. Perhaps you’re a CIO, who knows perfectly well that the cloud will have tremendous benefit for your company. But the CFO says no, it’s too risky, or the economic projections aren’t convincing. Or perhaps the CEO doesn’t think it’s a priority right now, or the board […]

Introduction by Mark Schwartz This post continues our series on governance in the cloud. In earlier posts we discussed new strategies for governance, the governance that requires standardization and rules, and governance that oversees projects and investments. In another post John Thorp of AWS Professional Services wrote about AWS’s frameworks for evolving your Governance, Risk, […]

In an earlier post, I proposed that rather than trying to make sense of the term digital transformation, we think of it as the application of eight new mental models to the way we do business. In that post I discussed the first four mental models; here I’ll cover the remaining ones. Model 5: Being […]

Introduction by Mark Schwartz Back around the end of 2018 we ran a series of blog posts on the implications of the cloud on cost structure, where we discussed some of the interesting and more subtle consequences of changing fixed costs to variable. In particular, as I pointed out, the cloud and DevOps let you […]

Introduction by Mark Schwartz In several earlier posts I discussed new strategies for governance in the cloud and the digital world in general. In the first, I talked about the kind of governance that requires standardization and rules. In the second, I wrote about governing projects and investments. The underlying point of these posts was […]

In my last post I talked about the need for leaders to have guts—in the sense of being willing to make decisions under uncertainty once they’ve gathered enough information. But that’s not the end of the story. In this post I want to talk about gutsy management of vendor relations. In the next post I’ll […]

As we’ve all realized by now, the term digital transformation has become slippery and overused. Something big is going on today in the way technology is used in large enterprises, a change that seems to have something to do with digital technology, digital ways of working, and the increasing importance of digital interactions in our […]