Author: Mark Schwartz

Every Board of Directors should be asking their executive team how they plan to deal with digital disruption. Even if a company is not yet facing disruption, it surely soon will be. And leaving it up to chance or just proceeding with the status quo is not a viable alternative.

The AWS Enterprise Strategy team helps executives at large AWS enterprise customers with their nontechnical impediments to digital transformation and the cloud. We try to bring our experience as senior IT leaders, as well as what we’ve learned from helping other customers and from the IT thought leader community, to bear on the challenges faced […]

In business school, we learned that companies need to develop sustainable competitive advantages. To build value for the long term, you needed to develop distinct competencies that your competitors would not be able to imitate, and then find a way to apply them as an advantage in the markets in which you compete. For some […]

Sorry, everyone—I know it’s a bit late to be posting a summary of last year’s content. It’s been a busy start to the year, meeting with customers in the US and Canada. In any case, here’s a summary of 2019’s enterprise strategy content that might help you find content that’s most useful to you. Much […]

I am often asked a question along these lines: Mark, I get that Agile and DevOps approaches favor learning and adjusting over rigidly following a plan. But our budgeting process locks in our spending (and therefore our annual plan) in advance, and our investment management process necessarily locks in spending levels and schedules for each […]

by John Brigden, VP of AWS Managed Services Introduction by Mark Schwartz In the digital world, speed is all-important. Short lead times allow companies to get products to market faster; build their products in fast, low-risk increments that incorporate customer feedback; respond quickly to disruption; and reduce risk through rapid customer testing and timely response […]

Operations in Mind: Building Amazing Stories by Design by James Windsor, Business Development Manager (ANZ), AWS Managed Services (AMS) introduction by Mark Schwartz, AWS Enterprise Strategist In this guest post, James Windsor from AWS Managed Services (AMS) talks about working backwards from a vision of what you want your organization to be, to make decisions […]

We hear a lot of talk these days about digital transformation. Enterprises see that they need to take advantage of new digital technologies and management techniques to become nimbler and to deepen their relationships with customers. Their technology now looks antiquated compared to the digital services they use every day; their processes seem slow compared […]

by Vieng Soukhavong, Global Sentinel Ops Leader, AWS Managed Cloud Introduction by Mark Schwartz, Enterprise Strategist This is the second post in our series from Amazon Managed Services (AMS), presenting what they have learned about operating effectively in the cloud. An important principle in the cloud and DevOps world is to design for operations. Code […]

Sometimes I think IT leaders are missing a key point in the way they speak to their non-technology counterparts. Case in point: we keep saying things like, “The company has to be more comfortable taking risks,” or “We have to fail fast,” or “We need to be less risk-averse.” I can guarantee that none of […]