Category: Finance and Investment

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 […]

By Bill Salak, CTO of Brainly Foreword by Thomas Blood, AWS Leader of Digital Innovation in EMEA As a former Enterprise Strategist and Leader of Digital Innovation in EMEA, I frequently talk to business executives and IT leaders. Leaders sometimes ask me about creating a single-pane-of-glass interface to manage multiple cloud providers. I always tell […]

After culture, people, and process, the most common topic I hear about is the surprise organisations have in shifting their thinking on financial management once on-prem applications move to the cloud. If done well this is a liberating opportunity to closely align cost with value, to engage the business at large in decisions previously abdicated […]

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 […]

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 […]

The roles of the CFO and CIO have been subtly changing. In many enterprises, these roles had veered away from the strategic focus that one would expect from CXOs. But to succeed in the digital world, as I discuss in my book War & Peace & IT, enterprises must let their CIOs and CFOs re-establish […]

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 […]

By Aleksandar Simovic Introduction by Mark Schwartz Serverless computing (for example, the capabilities offered by AWS Lambda) is not just a new technology. Its implications—not yet widely understood—include a deep impact on enterprise strategy. Essentially, serverless computing completes the transformation of IT platforms to a utility, something like electricity: whenever you need a little bit […]

by Erin Carlson, AWS Product Marketing Manager Introduction by Mark Schwartz, AWS Enterprise Strategist One of the advantages of the cloud is that it allows you to right-size your infrastructure continuously—to add infrastructure when you need it and release infrastructure and stop paying for it when you don’t. This gives enterprises new degrees of freedom […]

by Aleksandar Simovic Introduction by Mark Schwartz, AWS Enterprise Strategist In a post a few months ago titled Micro-Optimization: Activity-Based Costing for Digital Services, I pointed out that serverless computing in the cloud raises the possibility for us to optimize our costs at an extremely granular level, the level of individual functions within an application. Essentially, […]