AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

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 […]

We’ve learned from COVID-19 that in a crisis, enterprises quickly have to focus on getting their employees working again. It’s the chief prerequisite for reestablishing business operations. After all, how can your employees respond to the crisis if they can’t work? In an earlier post I pointed out that agility, or nimbleness, is the essential […]

Many enterprises anchor their IT strategy on buy vs. build decisions: what software packages or systems they buy versus which ones they prefer to build themselves. Buy over build is the default for most organizations, which is a sensible approach when considering that the majority of the IT estate doesn’t differentiate the business. For example, an […]

Sometimes, other leaders in your company reject your ideas. Perhaps you’re a CIO, who knows perfectly well that the cloud will have tremendous benefit for your company. But the CFO says no, it’s too risky, or the economic projections aren’t convincing. Or perhaps the CEO doesn’t think it’s a priority right now, or the board […]

Introduction by Mark Schwartz This post continues our series on governance in the cloud. In earlier posts we discussed new strategies for governance, the governance that requires standardization and rules, and governance that oversees projects and investments. In another post John Thorp of AWS Professional Services wrote about AWS’s frameworks for evolving your Governance, Risk, […]

In an earlier post, I proposed that rather than trying to make sense of the term digital transformation, we think of it as the application of eight new mental models to the way we do business. In that post I discussed the first four mental models; here I’ll cover the remaining ones. Model 5: Being […]