AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog
Category: Innovation and Reinvention
In Search of Silver Bullets: Moving Beyond Dreaming of Data
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -Arthur C. Clarke
The Project Management Office: From Technology Spectator to Enterprise Enabler
It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results. —Walter Bagehot The Project Management Office: From Technology Spectator to Enterprise Enabler A topic which several customers have raised is the role of Project Management Offices (PMOs) in agile organisations. The question is normally about the PMO’s relevance in the […]
Lessons in Embracing Messiness
Managers don’t solve simple, isolated problems; they manage messes. -Russell L. Ackoff By education and hobbies, I am an electronics engineer. Most problems I face in this domain can be solved through the application of mathematical principles and known solutions. Complex problems can be decomposed into multiple simpler problems and solved in the same way, […]
The Agile Organisation: Changing our Worldview
It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change. —Charles Darwin From childhood, our amazing brain trains itself to recognise patterns. We use this capability to accelerate decision-making, saving us addressing every problem as if new. To apply patterns we ingest, filter, and interpret data using […]
AI Explorations of a Former Media CTO (With No Prior Machine Learning Experience)
One of the challenges many enterprise leaders face is how to experiment and quickly create business value from machine learning without establishing large teams with specialized skillsets and infrastructure. As a CTO, I found that having access to Amazon Web Service’s pre-trained AI Services enabled our developers, even those with no prior machine leaning experience, […]
Blog Wrap-Up 2019
Sorry, everyone—I know it’s a bit late to be posting a summary of last year’s content. It’s been a busy start to the year, meeting with customers in the US and Canada. In any case, here’s a summary of 2019’s enterprise strategy content that might help you find content that’s most useful to you. Much […]
Mental Models for Your Digital Transformation
Mental models are deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behavior. – Peter Senge As leaders, we are responsible for making decisions in the […]
Best of Both Worlds: Building an Entrepreneurial Culture in the Enterprise
In our Executive Summit roundtable session at re:Invent 2019, Phil Potloff and I discussed the topic of innovation in large enterprises with executives spanning many industries and public sector organisations. Much has been written about how large companies often lose elements of their original DNA as they grow, including their aptitude to innovate. Given this, […]
Part 2: Microservices: Technical, Organizational, or Business Architecture? Yes
Organizations which design systems…are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. — M. Conway In a previous post, I covered what microservices are and their benefits. My aim was to help non-technical executives understand what microservices are and the role they play in supporting business objectives. Implemented correctly, a microservices architecture […]
Drive Change but Avoid the Chasms
Every change will be met with an equal, opposite, unpredictable change of its own. —Inspired by Isaac Newton In “Today’s CIO—Orchestrator in Chief,” we covered how changes can be introduced into organisations, but only eluded to matching different approaches with different audiences. This approach is similar to how marketers segment customers to target different buying […]