AWS Executive in Residence Blog
Category: Enterprise Strategy
What Are Three Things You Need to Do to Foster a Data-Driven Culture?
According to the worldwide bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, people make decisions either intuitively or logically. Intuition leads to fast decisions; rational thinking leads to slow decisions. In organizations, it’s the other way around. Intuition leads to long decision-making processes; data- and fact-driven decisions lead to shorter processes. In […]
Designing a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE)
Many companies have found that a cloud center of excellence (CCOE) can accelerate their migrations to the cloud and broader digital transformations. These CCOEs take many forms, which is appropriate because each company has unique challenges to overcome. Nevertheless there are certain patterns and antipatterns for using a CCOE. In this blog post, I’ll try […]
A Culture of Resilience
There’s something problematic about planning for resilience. On the one hand, we know it’s necessary. If the COVID pandemic taught us nothing else, we learned that unexpected major disruptions can and will occur. And those disruptions will involve not just technology but, in some cases, business processes, personnel, communication, and even the fundamental market characteristics […]
The Agile Enterprise
Assume with me that the digital world is a world of fast change. Organizations need to excel at responding quickly to those changes—that’s what we call agility or nimbleness. When it comes to technology, we have well-understood ways of increasing agility and making technology delivery processes lean. Organizations worldwide and in all industries are moving […]
Continuous Engagement and Innovation
In the digital world, formerly discrete activities have become continuous. In the old world of IT, software deliveries were considered discrete events. We created projects to deliver software capabilities, set requirements for them, deployed code, and then moved on to the next project. At least that was the theory. We knew those IT systems would […]
Navigating the Cloud Migration Bubble: Turning Your Bubble into a Blip
There is no doubt that the cloud has revolutionized how businesses operate, offering unparalleled scalability, flexibility, and innovation capability. However, amid the excitement of embracing the cloud, organizations often encounter a phenomenon known as the migration bubble. This bubble represents the initial surge of costs, complexities, and challenges that can temporarily disrupt transitions to the […]
Tenets: supercharging decision-making
“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist & philosopher Thinking is hard; energy intensive even. Perhaps that’s the reason we obsess about food. One estimate indicates we make over 200 food-related decisions a day. Another popular internet statistic boldly states that the average human makes […]
Business Value is IT’s Primary Measure of Progress
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. —”The 12 Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto” In the early days of my career, the success of my IT projects was measured by delivering on time, within budget, and with sufficiently good quality. “Sufficient” often meant that hundreds of […]
Managing in Economic Uncertainty: Cost Reductions
Managing in times of economic uncertainty means facing difficult choices. Reducing costs is a choice that leaders often face but mostly dread. Many of us on the Enterprise Strategy team have faced multiple macroeconomic headwinds or other industry- and company-specific challenges in our previous roles as CXOs. In this post, I outline some of the […]
Digital Transformation: the Why, Who, How, and What – Part 4, “The What”
In part three, ‘The How’ blog post, we covered best practices for transformational processes, and how you can use the digital-transformation process framework to deliver an effective transformation. In this blog post, we dive deeper into the technologies that enable digital transformation. Contemporary Technology Requirements The rising expectations of customers and employees, due to the […]









