Category: Finance and Investment

Managing in times of economic uncertainty means facing difficult choices. Reducing costs is a choice that leaders often face but mostly dread. Many of us on the Enterprise Strategy team have faced multiple macroeconomic headwinds or other industry- and company-specific challenges in our previous roles as CXOs. In this post, I outline some of the […]

By Levon Stepanian, Cloud Financial Management Specialist, and Chris Hennesey, Enterprise Finance Strategist Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and their finance organizations are no longer just financial record keepers; they are key stakeholders during their organization’s cloud-enabled digital transformation. In the “CFO Series: The Sniff Test?” blog post, Mark Schwartz makes the case that a CFO […]

To be honest, I’ve never liked the distinction between building and buying when it comes to software. Of course you shoud buy rather than build – if, somehow, there’s a third-party product that does exactly what you need, has the same roadmap for future development as your company will require, meets all your security needs, […]

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. —Edsger W. Dijkstra By Chris Hennesey and Phil Le-Brun, AWS Enterprise Strategists As a CIO or CFO, have you ever questioned how IT costs are allocated within your business? Ever been overwhelmed with the complexity and lack […]

One of the most common questions I get from customers is how to effectively manage their cloud costs. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers many programs to help customers evaluate and optimize their spending. The Cloud Economics team is fantastic at providing a detailed, holistic analysis of your environment and can identify areas of optimization and […]

When I discussed a customer’s IT strategy the other day, they highlighted how the “unbelievably good deal” that their outgoing CIO had negotiated with a major IT outsourcing provider became a major liability. Being in the travel and transportation business meant that they were severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, having to pivot to new […]

This mini-series of blog posts has highlighted the nuances of one of the most common and seemingly straightforward IT decisions: whether to build or buy a piece of software. We learned that common notions of cost and lock-in can be misplaced (Part 1), that differentiators are by no means static and can be found in […]

If you’re a CFO, you’re acutely aware of your fiduciary responsibilities. Over the long term, the cloud is likely to be a material element of your cost structure. The decision to move to the cloud must be made with appropriate care and diligence. To add complexity to the decision, much of your due diligence is […]

As I said in my last post, the way we’ve looked at IT investments and budgets has been missing some crucial context. It’s the current state of IT, the “balance sheet,” so to speak, that determines what spending and investments are necessary when considered alongside the company’s strategic imperatives. A conversation between the CIO and […]

It’s important for CIOs to be able to convey the current state of IT, particularly in conversations with their CFOs. I’ve written before about the CIO-CFO dialogue and how it should change in the digital age. In the past, CIO-CFO conversations have generally focused on budget planning and execution, or on multiyear capital planning. But […]