Category: Innovation and Reinvention

In my previous post I explained why environmental, social, and corporate governance (or ESG) has become such an important concern for enterprises; why it is a strategic consideration; why it rises to the level of the board of directors’ attention; and how it differs from corporate social responsibility (CSR) in that it requires the company’s […]

Environmental and social governance, or ESG, is a growing concern for business leaders—and for government regulators, investors, and standards bodies. Recent events have only increased the business world’s focus on ESG: worker wellness has become a major concern during the COVID-19 pandemic; social justice protests have drawn attention to gaps in diversity, equity, and inclusion; […]

This mini-series of blog posts has highlighted the nuances of one of the most common and seemingly straightforward IT decisions: whether to build or buy a piece of software. We learned that common notions of cost and lock-in can be misplaced (Part 1), that differentiators are by no means static and can be found in […]

While technology executives generally understand and accept that agile software development methods are effective, some may still be reluctant to approach their cloud transformations in an agile manner. They believe that a cloud transformation is too big and complex for Agile to work. In this blog post, Dr. Saša Baškarada, a senior cloud transformation advisor […]

“We need to be an AI-enabled company.” Replace the “AI” with any technology from history and this comment becomes a common refrain across businesses lured by the promises of new technology and fuelled by FOMO (a fear of missing out). As enterprise strategists and former CXOs who have lived through many “technology is the solution, […]

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 […]