AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

Category: Thought Leadership

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Untangling Your Organizational Hairball: How to Increase Local Autonomy

Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more. —Jeff Bezos, Executive Chairman of Amazon Traditional organizations focus on optimizing efficiency, trying to specialize and maximize the use […]

Untangling Your Organisational Hairball: A Framework

You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error. —Tim Harford, Economist Read any contemporary article on organisations and within the first few sentences the word, “agile” appears at least once. Some articles suggest achieving agility with a new target operating model (TOM), […]

Unleash Developer Productivity: How to Remove Common Blockers as an IT Leader

In the dynamic realm of software development, fostering a positive developer experience is critical to organizational success. However, certain practices inadvertently sabotage this experience, hindering productivity and innovation. Let’s examine these pitfalls and explore actionable strategies for IT leaders to overcome them and ensure a vibrant and efficient development ecosystem that attracts and retains talent. […]

2023 Year-End Blog Roundup

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 […]

From Sustainable IT to IT for Sustainability

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 […]

Top of Mind

What’s top of mind for Chief Data Officers going into 2024?

One year ago we published our first research report on the role of Chief Data Officers (CDOs). The renowned Tom Davenport, in partnership with MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium (CDOIQ), was commissioned to conduct a global study of CDOs across industries, tenures, and stages of the data journey. At the time I […]

Data Driven

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 […]

Team Building for finite project

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 […]