AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

  “The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide you’re not going to stay where you are.” — John Pierpont “J.P.” Morgan Today I’m excited to make two announcements: First, my new book, Ahead in the Cloud, became available last week. Over the last three and a half years as the Global Head of Enterprise Strategy for […]

    If your enterprise is undertaking a transformation, then you will need to help your employees develop new skills. That makes sense—your employees are probably very good at doing whatever you have done in the past, and transformation, by definition, is something new. You could bring in new employees who already have the new […]

In a previous blog post, I talked about how to drive top-down change in an enterprise, and how to take advantage of command-and-control authority even in an Agile setting. In this post, I’ll talk about a particular technique that draws on authority. It is the change management approach called “Shu-ha-ri,” a concept drawn from the […]

In my last post I covered why every organization has a big data problem. In summary, the shortcomings in legacy database technologies (and associated infrastructure costs) lead companies to fragment and throw a lot of data away because it’s not perfect, too big, too old, etc. In this post I’ll cover what businesses should expect […]

One of the joys of being part of AWS is that of seeing the innovative and inspiring ways that our customers are using the cloud and driving transformations within their organizations. And these are simply two sides of the same coin: the cloud is enabling new ways of doing business; the practice of management and […]

When it comes to digital transformation, every enterprise is different. There is often a change agent (or a set of change agents) with a vision, a knowledge of good practices, a sense of urgency, and the energy to battle impediments. The change agent(s) may be anywhere in the organizational structure: high, low, or—in a typical […]

We’ve probably all heard the DevOps principle “you build it, you run it.” In theory, DevOps makes each team responsible for both the development and operation of its code, giving DevOps teams complete responsibility — and complete visibility and transparency — for the entire value stream, including not just coding, testing, securing, and complying, but even the business results […]

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. […]