Category: Innovation and Reinvention

By Bill Salak, CTO of Brainly Foreword by Thomas Blood, AWS Leader of Digital Innovation in EMEA As a former Enterprise Strategist and Leader of Digital Innovation in EMEA, I frequently talk to business executives and IT leaders. Leaders sometimes ask me about creating a single-pane-of-glass interface to manage multiple cloud providers. I always tell […]

My detailed project plan won the war. — said no military commander, ever. In the chaos of battle, it is accepted military doctrine that highly centralised decision-making fails. Information cannot be rapidly assimilated from the front line and turned into timely decisions. To address this, a commander’s intent is communicated, guiding each platoon in their […]

With a bucket of Legos, you can tell any story. You can build an airplane or a dragon or a pirate ship—it’s whatever you can imagine. Christopher Miller One of the hallmarks of any digital transformation is increased speed and agility. Decisions need to be made more quickly using data and algorithms. Digital services need […]

If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.  Albert Einstein I’ve been asked multiple times recently what “digital transformation” means? Given that by 2023 conservative estimates of annual expenditure on digital transformations are north of $2 trillion but with well […]

I am often asked a question along these lines: Mark, I get that Agile and DevOps approaches favor learning and adjusting over rigidly following a plan. But our budgeting process locks in our spending (and therefore our annual plan) in advance, and our investment management process necessarily locks in spending levels and schedules for each […]

“A learning organisation is an organisation that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future.” Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline There is something excitingly headline worthy about big initiatives. There is also something depressingly familiar about their poor success rates. In Continuous Transformation: Stop Stopping Mark Schwartz stated that “…your digital transformation must prepare […]

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together” Vincent Van Gogh In my previous blog I outlined the role of the CIO in driving organisational change, and the first steps to be taken to build the case for change and a supporting coalition. In this post, I will dive into how […]

“Nothing is more difficult than to introduce a new order. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.” – Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince A regular topic with customers is how they can approach transforming their […]

I believe the fear that led to the deployment of large amounts of resources and budgets to remediate Y2K, followed by the dot-com bubble bust, had an unintended consequence. Many enterprises became extremely conservative when it came to building products, and defaulted to buying off the shelf wherever possible. Today, many enterprise IT teams are […]

“Human behaviour flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.” Plato As with many subjects, Plato was ahead of his time in understanding the challenges of a CIO. In many businesses today, we have excelled at the desire (“We will lead our industry with digital transformation.”) and the emotion (“I’m passionate about transforming our […]