Category: Innovation and Reinvention

“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 […]

“I never lose. I either win or I learn” Nelson Mandela A phrase that I find is not resonating well with enterprise executives is “fail fast.” Despite the best attempts to justify this exhortation, executives at an airline, financial, or restaurant company are clearly not going to embrace accepting a philosophy where the wrong type of […]

Although new to AWS, I am already hearing similar stories from enterprise customers regarding their challenges as they look to proactively grow and even disrupt their own businesses. While our AWS customers are interested in the technology, their stories more commonly address organisational, people, and process challenges. In this post, I will address some of […]

Application modernization is one of the big drivers of cloud adoption, with enterprises considering it as an opportunity to not just reduce operating costs as they move their core technology to the cloud, but also to improve performance, resiliency, and speed of delivery for new products and features. Enterprises also begin to modernize their architecture […]

Bryan Landerman recently hosted this webinar about what it means to build modern applications on AWS.  He covers the changes enterprises need to make regarding people, process, and technology and highlights how Amazon embarked on their own transformation back in 2001.

One of the things that I enjoy most about Amazon’s culture is that Customer Obsession is our first leadership principle. I was a customer for 26 years in my various roles at The Coca-Cola Company and benefited from Amazon’s customer obsession. What I found is this often comes down to creating, and constantly making better, […]

We hear a lot of talk these days about digital transformation. Enterprises see that they need to take advantage of new digital technologies and management techniques to become nimbler and to deepen their relationships with customers. Their technology now looks antiquated compared to the digital services they use every day; their processes seem slow compared […]

Sometimes I think IT leaders are missing a key point in the way they speak to their non-technology counterparts. Case in point: we keep saying things like, “The company has to be more comfortable taking risks,” or “We have to fail fast,” or “We need to be less risk-averse.” I can guarantee that none of […]

by Sid Arora, Sr. Product Manager, AWS Managed Services and Vieng Soukhavong, Global Head of Operations for AWS Managed Services introduction by Mark Schwartz, Enterprise Strategist Our Amazon Managed Services (AMS) group operates customer workloads in the cloud. It has learned a great deal from doing so and has devised innovative solutions for achieving high levels of reliability […]

The roles of the CFO and CIO have been subtly changing. In many enterprises, these roles had veered away from the strategic focus that one would expect from CXOs. But to succeed in the digital world, as I discuss in my book War & Peace & IT, enterprises must let their CIOs and CFOs re-establish […]