Category: Enterprise Strategy

I remember an incident from my previous CIO role. A number of us were in a meeting discussing the severe problems we were having with the performance of a large contractor. At one point, someone suggested that we start a new RFP (request for proposal) process to replace the contractor. “Too risky,” said one of […]

Enterprise executives contemplating a move to the cloud sometimes worry that their current employees will not be up to the job. After all, the cloud involves a rather different set of practices and technologies, and making the most of the cloud through DevOps, infrastructure as code, automated security and compliance guardrails, and so on requires […]

Large enterprises beginning a transformation journey often find that they already have pockets of transformation that have escaped notice. But why haven’t good practices spread from these isolated corners of the enterprise and transformed the rest of the organization? I think the answer is that transforming the whole of the enterprise requires…well, a large transformation. […]

The weekly Excel report comes out and is delivered to your email. As you review it, you see an anomaly in the financial data that you don’t understand, despite the pivot table provided in the report that allows you to drill down to at least some level of detail. You ask your operations analyst what’s […]

When an enterprise migrates into the cloud, it is empowered with many new ways to manage its costs. One important benefit is increased agility which in turn leads to leaner delivery processes with corresponding savings. With agility comes the possibility for rapid feedback-and-adjustment cycles, from which comes improved quality and a lower cost of rework. […]

The cloud changes not just how enterprises deliver IT capabilities, but how they compete, how they advance their top lines, how they foster innovation, and how they organize themselves for success. It stands to reason, then, that training for the cloud should extend not just to technical employees, but to the entire organization as well. […]

 “The hardest thing about getting started is getting started.” — Guy Kawasaki Executives are under increasing pressure to deliver Cloud transformation results quickly. Getting fully setup for success should not stop you from getting going, that said, understanding lessons learned from those who have gone before, saves time and money. As an enterprise strategist for Amazon Web Services, […]

In his post on the AWS Public Sector blog, John Brady, the CISO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), talks about building a data lake in the cloud to reduce the cost of curiosity. The concept is brilliant and consistent with the way I like to think about agility and innovation: that reducing the […]

When we talk about enterprise agility in the cloud, we’re often talking about achieving it through DevOps or other Agile software delivery approaches — about the ability to quickly provision infrastructure, load it up with deployed software, receive fast feedback from users, and scale up and scale down instantaneously. But software agility is only one type of […]

https://www.shutterstock.com/g/mikdam “… Reform the environment and not man; being absolutely confident that if you give man the right environment, he will behave favorably.” — Buckminster Fuller As an enterprise strategist at AWS, I often talk to customers about strategies that will help them move workloads to the cloud. Occasionally, I’ll hear from senior executives who don’t want […]