Category: Enterprise Strategy

We’ve learned from COVID-19 that in a crisis, enterprises quickly have to focus on getting their employees working again. It’s the chief prerequisite for reestablishing business operations. After all, how can your employees respond to the crisis if they can’t work? In an earlier post I pointed out that agility, or nimbleness, is the essential […]

Many enterprises anchor their IT strategy on buy vs. build decisions: what software packages or systems they buy versus which ones they prefer to build themselves. Buy over build is the default for most organizations, which is a sensible approach when considering that the majority of the IT estate doesn’t differentiate the business. For example, an […]

Sometimes, other leaders in your company reject your ideas. Perhaps you’re a CIO, who knows perfectly well that the cloud will have tremendous benefit for your company. But the CFO says no, it’s too risky, or the economic projections aren’t convincing. Or perhaps the CEO doesn’t think it’s a priority right now, or the board […]

Introduction by Mark Schwartz This post continues our series on governance in the cloud. In earlier posts we discussed new strategies for governance, the governance that requires standardization and rules, and governance that oversees projects and investments. In another post John Thorp of AWS Professional Services wrote about AWS’s frameworks for evolving your Governance, Risk, […]

In an earlier post, I proposed that rather than trying to make sense of the term digital transformation, we think of it as the application of eight new mental models to the way we do business. In that post I discussed the first four mental models; here I’ll cover the remaining ones. Model 5: Being […]

The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved. —C. Northcote Parkinson: Parkinson’s Law of Triviality   In my last blog post I covered issues inherent in freeing up time to become more agile. In this post I’ll get into some ways of eliminating […]

Introduction by Mark Schwartz Back around the end of 2018 we ran a series of blog posts on the implications of the cloud on cost structure, where we discussed some of the interesting and more subtle consequences of changing fixed costs to variable. In particular, as I pointed out, the cloud and DevOps let you […]

Introduction by Mark Schwartz In several earlier posts I discussed new strategies for governance in the cloud and the digital world in general. In the first, I talked about the kind of governance that requires standardization and rules. In the second, I wrote about governing projects and investments. The underlying point of these posts was […]

A person who chases two rabbits catches neither. —Confucius “I need to transform my organisation to become more agile, but I don’t have enough people or time.” Does this ring a bell? As organisations look to evolve their culture and adopt supporting cloud-based technologies, one significant challenge is how to do this while also keeping […]

In my last post I talked about the need for leaders to have guts—in the sense of being willing to make decisions under uncertainty once they’ve gathered enough information. But that’s not the end of the story. In this post I want to talk about gutsy management of vendor relations. In the next post I’ll […]