Category: Best Practices

Happy holidays to everyone! During this time, I like to look back on the year in AWS Enterprise Strategy Blog posts to see what themes have emerged. This blog addresses the concerns and challenges voiced by executives during the Enterprise Strategy team’s approximately 1,500 annual meetings with AWS customers. Reflecting on these important topics reveals […]

Sustainability has become a board-level topic. In Europe, it is a top-ten concern for CEOs who see it as one of the important, if not the most important, long-term risks that need to be managed. CIOs are looking for options to reduce their IT estates’ carbon footprints, and using technology to reduce carbon throughout the […]

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 […]

It’s the job of senior enterprise leaders to ensure that their organizations are ready for the future. Unfortunately the future is unclear to us—all the more so in this era of rapid change, uncertainty, and complexity. As with the weather, we can foresee the near future with some certainty, but as we look further ahead, […]

The emergence of generative AI has brought about transformative possibilities and the potential to benefit how we work, live, and interact with the world. However, it is crucial to recognize the responsibility that comes with such powerful technology. When I speak to executives today, there is a lot of enthusiasm and excitement to get started […]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A company wants to transform to meet the future. The transformation is necessary; without it, they will be threatened by disruptive competitors or unable to serve their customers. But they can’t get started on the transformation because their employees are busy with their day-to-day jobs. Transforming requires effort. […]

IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has changed IT for the worse. OK, now that I have your attention, let me be fair: ITIL has benefited many aspects of IT (e.g., help desks, infrastructure management, service delivery, etc.) by bringing structure, standards, and consistent, repeatable processes to what was previously a free-for-all. The problem is that IT […]

Never waste your time; it is too precious. There are never any guarantees we will have tomorrow. —Catherine Pulsifer, Author “I don’t have enough (fill in the blank)” is a common refrain in the face of new demands. It’s normally followed by that much-loved phrase “We need to prioritise.” I’ve observed that the challenge is […]

Many of my conversations with AWS customers are about their attempts to build developer experience platforms that simplify software development and operations, automate deployments, improve software quality, reduce costs, and ensure security and compliance. Unfortunately, not all platforms live up to their expectations. The most frequently cited problem is development teams rejecting the platform that […]

As an Enterprise Strategist, I find multicloud topics come up in many discussions rife with confusion, false certainty, and tentativeness. Companies are bombarded with conflicting messaging telling them either to never adopt a multicloud approach or to not miss out because “everyone is switching to multicloud.” There are good reasons for either pursuing or avoiding […]