Category: Innovation and Reinvention

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 […]

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing highlights from my conversations with seven leaders around their perspectives on innovation at scale when it comes to people and organization. Our dialogues with these leaders, from both commercial enterprises and the public sector, explore how these individuals cultivate next level leaders, how they deal with failure, […]

A constraint is a limitation that’s placed upon us. In this post we’ll look at three different types of constraints—time constraints, resource constraints, and guardrails—and explore how each of them can be used to drive innovation, speed, and efficiency. Using Time Constraints to Focus on the Things That Matter In their post on The Two-Week […]

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 […]

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 […]

By Eddie Murray, Global Oil & Gas Leader, Amazon Web Services Introduction by Mark Schwartz, Enterprise Strategist, AWS As my colleague Miriam McLemore says, large enterprises have innovation in their DNA. There was something innovative they did that got them to be big enterprises in the first place, and probably many innovations along the way. […]

by Jeanine Banks, General Manager, Industry & ISV Solutions at AWS Introduction by Mark Schwartz In another take on the question of risk and controls, Jeanine Banks, from our  Product Management organization, shows how companies moving into the digital age are often focused on the wrong risks and build walls and controls that stifle innovation. […]

Live blog post from re:Invent 2018, Las Vegas For decades, enterprises have thought of data in terms of the relational database model. It is a brilliant model and has solved many of the data-handling problems of early IT. With a normalized database schema, we could reduce redundancy and bring out the relationships between data items […]