Category: Enterprise Strategy

In my last post, I talked about one type of governance—the make-a-rule-and-enforce-it governance style, which applies to standardization, controls, compliance, and other areas that can be handled through general rules. For that type of governance, the digital world changes nothing aside from making it substantially more effective.

There is an undeniable push in tech to build microservices—and for good reason. Smaller components pair well with modern delivery practices and objectives. According to Gartner, two out of three business leaders believe that they must pick up the pace of digitalization to remain competitive. In turn, businesses are working to pick up the pace […]

Governance must balance two objectives: it must control, and at the same time it must enable.

Think of an industry that isn’t affected by the digital revolution in any way. One that can keep operating as it has been without any fear of disruption or need for change. When we tried this exercise at a workshop, we also couldn’t think of many. Funeral homes sprang to mind, but managing a person’s […]

Every Board of Directors should be asking their executive team how they plan to deal with digital disruption. Even if a company is not yet facing disruption, it surely soon will be. And leaving it up to chance or just proceeding with the status quo is not a viable alternative.

The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived. —Robert Jordan “Survival” is a reoccurring word in the lexicon of change management. It implies a fight to the death, an existential mission against overwhelming odds and adversary. It’s not a bad metaphor for what we call digital transformation […]

Internet was the future and the dot-com boom was just around the corner. I had just landed a job as a developer before I even graduated. I was looking forward to learning Java, working on some e-commerce projects, and being a part of the next dot-com success story. Optimism was in the air. Then, on […]

The AWS Enterprise Strategy team helps executives at large AWS enterprise customers with their nontechnical impediments to digital transformation and the cloud. We try to bring our experience as senior IT leaders, as well as what we’ve learned from helping other customers and from the IT thought leader community, to bear on the challenges faced […]

In business school, we learned that companies need to develop sustainable competitive advantages. To build value for the long term, you needed to develop distinct competencies that your competitors would not be able to imitate, and then find a way to apply them as an advantage in the markets in which you compete. For some […]

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -Arthur C. Clarke