Category: Enterprise Strategy

In earlier blog posts I’ve talked about the CIO-CFO relationship, how it’s changing, and how it needs to change. In this post I’ll begin delving into what sorts of conversations should really be taking place between CFOs and CIOs and how the CIO can better frame these discussions. Must-Spending: The Historical Focus Beginning in, oh, […]

I’m excited to announce the publication of my fourth book, The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler. Despite the whimsical title, it’s about a critical concern of enterprises transitioning to the cloud and trying to thrive in the digital economy. From our meetings with enterprise AWS […]

Larry Augustin, VP of Applications at AWS, shares how organizations are reimagining their post-pandemic workforces as part of a new blog series, Reimagining the Workforce. Eating lunch with a colleague, brainstorming around a whiteboard, kicking off a new project with a full room’s energy, celebrating a significant accomplishment together—these are some of the things I […]

In my third installment on digging deeper into deciding between buying software and building it in house, I want to describe how organizations can transition from a “mostly bought” environment to one where they can productively build bespoke solutions. As an industry we are mildly guilty of repeatedly showing great target pictures but then falling […]

In most organizations, the bottleneck is at the top of the bottle. —Peter Drucker   Should technology be centralised or decentralised in an organisation? An easy question to ask, and one where leaders can talk themselves into believing there is a simple solution to a normally messy problem. If you accept that organisations are complex […]

Best practices usually aren’t. —Peter Thiel, Entrepreneur   I generally dislike the phrase best practice. It implies that a single truth has been discovered for something which cannot be improved upon. It engenders a complacency that, once the practice is implemented, thinking and innovation can stop. This goes for organisational models too.  Business cases that […]

My previous post highlighted that even seemingly straightforward decisions can become challenging in the context of the vast scope and complexity of enterprise IT. For example, when considering whether to build a bespoke software in house over buying a commercial one, many companies overlook several critical nuances: You pay in opportunity cost, not just direct […]

To manage one must lead. To lead, one must understand the work that he and his people are responsible for. —Edwards Deming   We have a problem. Proclamations about the cloud, agility, and digital transformation hide the growing gap between the speed of the outside world and the speed inside organisations. My colleague Gregor Hohpe […]

If you’ve been doing something for a while, and now you change course, is that an admission that the way you were doing it before was a mistake? If you’ve spent a lot on something, should you toss it out when something better comes along? If your budget is full of “keeping the lights on” […]

I was talking to the executive team at one of our enterprise customers recently when this connection suddenly hit me. Someone on the team had asked a question along the lines of “How can you organize the activities of autonomous teams so that you can trust them to work on the right things?” An easy […]