AWS Enterprise Strategy Blog 2018 Wrap-Up

Our enterprise strategy blog—like the rest of Amazon and AWS—is oriented around the expressed needs of our customers. We write about the issues and challenges facing the enterprises we meet with, and try our best to give them new ways of framing problems, of anticipating the future of IT, of thinking about the cloud and digital transformation, and of applying what seem (provisionally) to be best practices. Our aim is to help our enterprise customers innovate and ensure that their business is sustainable (or “survivable”) through periods of digital disruption. In other words, we hope that we can help enterprise executives harness the power of the cloud and digital technology to grow, succeed, and better serve their customers and their missions.

Because our blog posts emerge from our interactions with customers, their chronological order doesn’t fully communicate the recurring themes we see. In this post I would like to summarize this year’s 75 posts, re-organizing them into topic areas.

We’d also like to wish all of our readers a happy holiday season and a happy new year!

Leadership (16)

• Principles
  • Humility
  • Bar-Raising as a Principle
  • Shiny Objects and Professionalism
  • What are Your Cloud Transformation Principles?
• Leadership Across the Organizational Chart
  • Leading from all Levels: An Ebook of Change Leadership Practices
  • Driving Change from the Top Down: Wielding Organizational Power
  • Top-Down Transformation: Shu-Ha-Ri to Go Beyond Command-and-Control
  • Transforming Up and Down: Leading Change from the Middle
  • Leading from the Middle Part Two: Selling Ideas and Playing Politics
  • Leading Change from Deep in the Org Chart
• Cases
  • Staying Inspired: A Conversation with Today’s Enterprise Cloud Leaders
  • Keeping Up with Technology: A Conversation with Today’s Enterprise Cloud Leaders
  • On Failure: A conversation with today’s enterprise cloud leaders
  • Developing Next Level Leaders: A Conversation with Today’s Enterprise Cloud Leaders
  • Ahead in the Cloud: Peter Loeffler of Siemens
  • Ahead in the Cloud: Alpna J. Doshi, Group CIO of Philips

Finance and Investment Management (18)

• Principles
  • A New Series: Digital Transformation for CFOs and Finance Departments
  • A New Series of Finance and IT Posts
  • The Digital CFO
  • Decisions at the Margins
  • Finance as a Competitive Advantage
  • Free Cash Flows and Innovation
  • An Executive View of Lean and Agile IT
  • Are IT Systems Like Other Capital Investments????
  • Micro-Optimization: Activity-Based Costing for Digital Services?
  • Introducing FinOps—Excuse Me, DevSecFinBizOps
  • Complexity or Choice?
  • E-Book—The Series So Far (Part 1)
  • Switching Costs and Lock-In
• Risk Management
  • Risk is Lack of Agility
  • Reducing Risk in the Cloud by Overcoming the Status Quo Bias
• Cost Management
  • Managing Your Cost Savings with Amazon Reserved Instances
  • Accessing Your RI Purchase Recommendations and Identifying Opportunities for Cost Optimization
  • Rightsizing Infrastructure Can Cut Costs 36%

Transformation Strategy (24)

• Tools and Techniques
  • Get a Lean Start with the Cloud Using the Cloud Strategy Canvas
  • The Cloud Strategy Canvas: A User’s Guide
  • The Power of Constraints
  • The Two-Week Rule: Refactor Your Applications for the Cloud in 10 Days
  • Connect Your Technology and Business Strategies with These Two Frameworks
• Patterns of Transformation
  • Anti-Patterns for Enterprise IT
  • Effective Patterns for Enterprise IT
  • Cloud Anti-Pattern: Guardians at the Gate
  • Challenging Conventional Wisdom About How to Build a Cloud Center of Excellence
  • Creating the Cloud Business Office
  • 12 Steps to Get Started With The Cloud
  • Your First Four Steps in Transforming Enterprise IT Governance
  • The Allure of Sweet Fudge Versus a Lean Transformation Diet
  • The Great Cloud Refactoring Debate
  • The Start-Up Enterprise: Step One
  • How to Go Fast
• Reinvention and Redesign
  • Designed for the Cloud
  • Database Freedom: Let’s Take Off Our Database Blinders—For Good
  • Lowering the Cost of Curiosity
  • The Critical Missing Piece of DevOps…And How to Find It
  • Continuous Optimization
  • Offer Developer APIs to Your Partners and Customers
  • Yes, You Should Modernize Your Mainframe with the Cloud
  • Is Your Walled Garden Nourishing or Stunting Your Transformation

Security (5)

• Security at AWS
• Data Protection in AWS
• Are You Secure Enough Outside the Cloud?
• 5 Steps to Building a Culture of Security
• Building a Culture of Security

Industries and Case Studies (4)

• Oil and Gas Companies Get Practical about Cloud Innovation
• Miners Extract More Value from the Cloud When They Transform Their Cultures
• Cloud Gives Miners a Path to Innovate
• Patterns and Anti-Patterns at USCIS

Analytics and Big Data (3)

• Analytics Part 1: Why Every Company Has a Big Data Problem
• What to Expect from Your Analytics Platform
• Organizing for Insights

Training and Building Skills (4)

• Getting Started with Training for the Cloud
• Scaling Good Practices across the Enterprise
• Using a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) to Transform the Entire Enterprise
• Training the Entire Enterprise to Harness the Cloud’s Full Value

Miscellany (4)

• Ahead in the Cloud: My New Book on the Future of Enterprise IT (and My New Role)
• AWS Control Tower and AWS Security Hub, powerful enterprise twins
• AWS Enterprise Strategy Blog 2018 Wrap-Up

You might also want to take a look at the books that have been published by the enterprise strategy team, which cover many of the issues of interest to leaders of enterprises undertaking digital transformations:

• Stephen Orban,Ahead in the Cloud
• Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility
• Mark Schwartz, The Art of Business Value
• Mark Schwartz, War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age(now available for pre-order!)

Thanks for reading our blog, happy holidays, and happy new year!

–Mark

@schwartz_cio
A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility
The Art of Business Value
War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age (now available for pre-order!)