Category: Innovation and Reinvention

There’s a path to digital transformation for companies in every industry, including those that have strong traditions and are highly risk-averse. In this blog post, John Lucking, AWS Principal Solutions Architect, looks at the insurance industry. —Mark Guest post by By John Lucking, AWS Principal Solutions Architect In risk-averse industries like insurance, customers frequently ask […]

In this guest post, Doug Smith, AWS Americas Advisory Shared Delivery Practice Leader, and Prasad MK, Senior Advisory Consultant, talk about using the cloud to support platform and ecosystem models. As enterprises consider the new business models and strategies available to them in the cloud, many should consider these an option; platform and ecosystems have […]

In my third installment on digging deeper into deciding between buying software and building it in house, I want to describe how organizations can transition from a “mostly bought” environment to one where they can productively build bespoke solutions. As an industry we are mildly guilty of repeatedly showing great target pictures but then falling […]

In most organizations, the bottleneck is at the top of the bottle. —Peter Drucker   Should technology be centralised or decentralised in an organisation? An easy question to ask, and one where leaders can talk themselves into believing there is a simple solution to a normally messy problem. If you accept that organisations are complex […]

My previous post highlighted that even seemingly straightforward decisions can become challenging in the context of the vast scope and complexity of enterprise IT. For example, when considering whether to build a bespoke software in house over buying a commercial one, many companies overlook several critical nuances: You pay in opportunity cost, not just direct […]

Many enterprises anchor their IT strategy on buy vs. build decisions: what software packages or systems they buy versus which ones they prefer to build themselves. Buy over build is the default for most organizations, which is a sensible approach when considering that the majority of the IT estate doesn’t differentiate the business. For example, an […]

In an earlier post, I proposed that rather than trying to make sense of the term digital transformation, we think of it as the application of eight new mental models to the way we do business. In that post I discussed the first four mental models; here I’ll cover the remaining ones. Model 5: Being […]

As we’ve all realized by now, the term digital transformation has become slippery and overused. Something big is going on today in the way technology is used in large enterprises, a change that seems to have something to do with digital technology, digital ways of working, and the increasing importance of digital interactions in our […]

Your cloud migration was off to a good start: you set out with a clear plan, used the “Six Rs” to segment your workloads by the different strategies of moving to the cloud, and have closely tracked core metrics like number of applications migrated. However, your stakeholders have become increasingly doubtful as to whether the […]

Think of an industry that isn’t affected by the digital revolution in any way. One that can keep operating as it has been without any fear of disruption or need for change. When we tried this exercise at a workshop, we also couldn’t think of many. Funeral homes sprang to mind, but managing a person’s […]