Category: Enterprise Strategy

As an Enterprise Strategist at AWS I get to work with executives from the world’s largest organizations as they drive digital transformation efforts. What may come as a surprise is that we tend to talk less about the technology and more about the people, processes, and culture needed to enable business transformation. A couple of […]

I promise this is not clickbait. In my last post, The Great Cloud Refactoring Debate, I introduced the Two-Week Rule as one example for enterprises planning a migration to the cloud. The Two-Week Rule is not a theoretical approach, but an actual cloud migration mechanism that we developed during my time at Edmunds.com to complete […]

  On July 2, I began a series of blog posts for CFOs interested in digital transformation. In this post, I’ll summarize where we are with the series. In researching and writing these posts I have learned a great deal about what CFOs are focused on, and I have realized that there are still a […]

You might say that humility is the essence of digital transformation. In the digital world, we are willing to be surprised and to learn. In the old days, we relied on a plan—prepared in advance—to guide our activities. The plan was made by someone, or some collection of someones, who knew enough to specify what […]

The time has passed when CFOs could focus only on cost control and financial reporting. A company’s finance function, in the digital world, is a driver of competitive advantage, of strategy, and of innovation. In a competitive environment, the winner will be the company that best acquires financial resources, invests those resources in the right […]

By Erin Carlson, AWS Product Marketing Manager Introduction by Mark Schwartz One of the advantages of the cloud is that it allows you to right-size your infrastructure continuously—to add infrastructure when you need it and release infrastructure and stop paying for it when you don’t. This gives enterprises new degrees of freedom in managing their […]

*Note: this post is not intended as accounting advice. It is about how to structure IT investments and make decisions about them, not how to account for them. Do IT projects have the characteristics of capital investments? I am not talking about their accounting treatment—that is outside my area of expertise. I am asking from […]

Over the last two decades, the IT profession has developed new ways of working that are intended to deliver better business value more quickly and at lower risk. Or as Jonathan Smart of Barclay’s likes to say, “Better, Faster, Safer, Happier.”[1] There are buzzwords associated with these techniques, of course, as with everything in IT—in this […]

Jonathon Dixon, Global Head of Mining & Resources, Amazon Web Services Introduction by Thomas Blood, AWS Enterprise Strategist and Evangelist Until the 1930s, my family owned and operated gold, silver, and copper mines in Colorado. I have a fondness for mining, based on the stories my father shared with me about the people who extract […]

One strategy for enterprises looking to monetize their data and services is to offer an Application Programming Interface (API). This strategy has been used successfully in a range of companies, in industries including travel and – surprisingly, perhaps – banking. AWS offers a number of tools that can help not just in creating and operating […]