Category: Finance and Investment

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 […]

It’s no surprise that organizations are worried about becoming locked in to their cloud provider. After all, the history of IT is full of examples of vendors taking advantage of high switching costs to impose restrictive licensing terms and to increase prices. But I think that the cloud is different—and in fact, is making it […]

Customers often ask us how Amazon manages to sustain its pace of innovation. It is truly an amazing pace: on average, AWS releases a major new feature or service approximately once every five hours, day and night, 365 days a year. Since 90–95% of our roadmap comes from what customers tell us they need, you […]

I have just posted a series of blog posts that are intended to paint a picture of IT finance for the future. They are related to one another in interesting ways (and hyperlinked, of course) so I thought I would lay out the full picture here. The ideas have emerged over a series of conversations […]

Who is accountable for managing the costs of a digital service? Enterprises are increasingly pushing accountability outward to cross-functional teams. There is an important reason for this: teams can make decisions and put them into action quickly, and speed is important. By putting a cross-functional group of people on the same team, the enterprise makes […]

As I have argued in my other posts, the digital world is bringing a radical change in the role of the CFO. For one thing, the cloud and DevOps are turning fixed costs into variable costs. For another, rapid iteration and delivery make it possible—and essential—for us to make financial decisions based on marginal costs […]

As we navigate the changes brought about by the digital revolution, we can see that the role of the enterprise CFO is also changing. Whether the one is the cause of the other, and which is cause and which effect, I’m not so sure. But the digital world certainly requires us to think very differently […]

The annual budgeting process leads us to make decisions based on total costs. We assign a budget to a cost category, then spend the year managing to that cost. Our investment management process similarly leads us to think in terms of total costs. We plan against a set of requirements, estimate the total cost, figure […]

The world of traditional on-premises IT has become reasonably accurate at forecasting operating costs. We’ve been running IT in a very similar, familiar way for a long time, and we’ve become good at it. When adopting cloud, it can be helpful to reevaluate how we think about cost management, particularly around fixed-cost models and consumption-based […]

In previous blog posts I have described anti-patterns of enterprise IT that we often observe in enterprises we work with, and patterns of successful enterprise IT that are their antidotes. To make these patterns and anti-patterns more concrete, I will explain how they have played out at my old organization, US Citizenship and Immigration Services […]