Category: Culture and Training

“Nothing is more difficult than to introduce a new order. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.” – Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince A regular topic with customers is how they can approach transforming their […]

“Human behaviour flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.” Plato As with many subjects, Plato was ahead of his time in understanding the challenges of a CIO. In many businesses today, we have excelled at the desire (“We will lead our industry with digital transformation.”) and the emotion (“I’m passionate about transforming our […]

“I never lose. I either win or I learn” Nelson Mandela A phrase that I find is not resonating well with enterprise executives is “fail fast.” Despite the best attempts to justify this exhortation, executives at an airline, financial, or restaurant company are clearly not going to embrace accepting a philosophy where the wrong type of […]

Although new to AWS, I am already hearing similar stories from enterprise customers regarding their challenges as they look to proactively grow and even disrupt their own businesses. While our AWS customers are interested in the technology, their stories more commonly address organisational, people, and process challenges. In this post, I will address some of […]

Application modernization is one of the big drivers of cloud adoption, with enterprises considering it as an opportunity to not just reduce operating costs as they move their core technology to the cloud, but also to improve performance, resiliency, and speed of delivery for new products and features. Enterprises also begin to modernize their architecture […]

“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” ― Jim Barksdale Conversations about data-driven enterprises often focus on tools, big data, and the technological advancements that have made storing, processing, and analyzing data faster and cheaper. While these are all important, creating a data-driven culture […]

In my previous post I talked about the presumed challenge of the “frozen middle”—the middle managers who seem to resist transformation even when both the leaders of the organization and the hands-on executors want to see it happen. In that post I discussed the changing role of middle management and the critical role middle managers […]

First in a two-part series In many of our conversations with customers, we hear talk of a “frozen middle”—middle managers in IT who are reluctant to change and either block or slow down attempts at transformation. The idea is that senior leadership wants to gain the benefits of the cloud and digital transformation while line […]

A frequent topic in our conversations with enterprise leaders is just how difficult it is to find people with the right skills for the digital age. We often suggest that their go-to-strategy should be to grow talent internally, developing the skills of people they already employ (an earlier blog post covers this subject as well). But […]

I’m very excited to announce that today is the official publication date of my latest book, War & Peace & IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age. It is intended as the hitherto missing book for senior enterprise executives on how best to work with their technology organizations to accomplish their digital […]