Author: Mark Schwartz

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 […]

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 […]