Category: Finance and Investment

Enterprise leaders often ask us how to get started in digital transformation. The question usually comes after a discussion about the urgency of transformation and what a transformed enterprise looks like—the benefits of transformation and the business models it enables. At first, the journey seems long and involved; the changes dramatic and far-reaching. We often […]

Working in the cloud is not just a matter of reducing costs once when you migrate your workloads. It is a matter of constant adjustment to gain all of the cost benefits that AWS makes available to you. We call this process cost optimization—the active oversight of costs as your organization and its market change, […]

  On July 2, I began a series of blog posts for CFOs interested in digital transformation. In this post, I’ll summarize where we are with the series. In researching and writing these posts I have learned a great deal about what CFOs are focused on, and I have realized that there are still a […]

The time has passed when CFOs could focus only on cost control and financial reporting. A company’s finance function, in the digital world, is a driver of competitive advantage, of strategy, and of innovation. In a competitive environment, the winner will be the company that best acquires financial resources, invests those resources in the right […]

By Erin Carlson, AWS Product Marketing Manager Introduction by Mark Schwartz 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 in managing their […]

*Note: this post is not intended as accounting advice. It is about how to structure IT investments and make decisions about them, not how to account for them. Do IT projects have the characteristics of capital investments? I am not talking about their accounting treatment—that is outside my area of expertise. I am asking from […]

Today’s digital transformations pose a number of challenges, or certainly major changes, for finance professionals in enterprises. Yet finance is a critical player in these transformations and in the “transformed” enterprise. Enterprises must make decisions about what IT and digital capabilities to invest in, how to fund and account for those capabilities, how to budget […]

In an earlier post, I talked about how risk decisions are often compromised by the status quo bias. In this post, I would like to present an alternative way to think about risk—a way that fits well with today’s business practices. To be precise, I want to try to demonstrate that risk in a business […]

I remember an incident from my previous CIO role. A number of us were in a meeting discussing the severe problems we were having with the performance of a large contractor. At one point, someone suggested that we start a new RFP (request for proposal) process to replace the contractor. “Too risky,” said one of […]

When an enterprise migrates into the cloud, it is empowered with many new ways to manage its costs. One important benefit is increased agility which in turn leads to leaner delivery processes with corresponding savings. With agility comes the possibility for rapid feedback-and-adjustment cycles, from which comes improved quality and a lower cost of rework. […]