Category: Innovation and Reinvention

You might say that humility is the essence of digital transformation. In the digital world, we are willing to be surprised and to learn. In the old days, we relied on a plan—prepared in advance—to guide our activities. The plan was made by someone, or some collection of someones, who knew enough to specify what […]

Over the last two decades, the IT profession has developed new ways of working that are intended to deliver better business value more quickly and at lower risk. Or as Jonathan Smart of Barclay’s likes to say, “Better, Faster, Safer, Happier.”[1] There are buzzwords associated with these techniques, of course, as with everything in IT—in this […]

Jonathon Dixon, Global Head of Mining & Resources, Amazon Web Services Introduction by Thomas Blood, AWS Enterprise Strategist and Evangelist Until the 1930s, my family owned and operated gold, silver, and copper mines in Colorado. I have a fondness for mining, based on the stories my father shared with me about the people who extract […]

One strategy for enterprises looking to monetize their data and services is to offer an Application Programming Interface (API). This strategy has been used successfully in a range of companies, in industries including travel and – surprisingly, perhaps – banking. AWS offers a number of tools that can help not just in creating and operating […]

There’s been a lot of industry buzz about digital transformation but little clear information about what it means. What does it mean to be “digital?” How different is it from what we do today? How much of a transformation does going “digital” require? What is clear is that the pace of innovation, change, and disruption […]

In my last post I covered why every organization has a big data problem. In summary, the shortcomings in legacy database technologies (and associated infrastructure costs) lead companies to fragment and throw a lot of data away because it’s not perfect, too big, too old, etc. In this post I’ll cover what businesses should expect […]

We’ve probably all heard the DevOps principle “you build it, you run it.” In theory, DevOps makes each team responsible for both the development and operation of its code, giving DevOps teams complete responsibility — and complete visibility and transparency — for the entire value stream, including not just coding, testing, securing, and complying, but even the business results […]

In his post on the AWS Public Sector blog, John Brady, the CISO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), talks about building a data lake in the cloud to reduce the cost of curiosity. The concept is brilliant and consistent with the way I like to think about agility and innovation: that reducing the […]

When we talk about enterprise agility in the cloud, we’re often talking about achieving it through DevOps or other Agile software delivery approaches — about the ability to quickly provision infrastructure, load it up with deployed software, receive fast feedback from users, and scale up and scale down instantaneously. But software agility is only one type of […]

“The only thing that is constant is change.” — Heraclitus Most executives that I talk to tell me that their journey to the cloud is more about business and cultural transformation than it is about technology adoption. To that end, I’ve been writing a series on a mental model that I call the Stages of Adoption, which […]