Category: Enterprise Strategy

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 […]

“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts—for support rather than for illumination.” —Andrew Lang When it comes to the data, it is culture first and capability second. In my previous post, I talked about how executives can create a data-driven culture in their enterprises. In this post, I am going to dive […]

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 […]

After culture, people, and process, the most common topic I hear about is the surprise organisations have in shifting their thinking on financial management once on-prem applications move to the cloud. If done well this is a liberating opportunity to closely align cost with value, to engage the business at large in decisions previously abdicated […]

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 […]

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A customer recently asked me how we introduced the concept of “failing forward” at Cox Automotive. It is a change many enterprises are […]

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 […]