AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog
Mental Models to Clarify the Goals of Digital Transformation, Part 1
As we’ve all realized by now, the term digital transformation has become slippery and overused. Something big is going on today in the way technology is used in large enterprises, a change that seems to have something to do with digital technology, digital ways of working, and the increasing importance of digital interactions in our […]
Creating Psychological Safety: The Building Block for Agility
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. ― Ernest Hemingway At a discussion on the characteristics of modern agile organisations, a chief people officer asked how psychological safety could be created in the workplace. In the moment an answer eluded me. The topic came up again as […]
Resilience, Part One: Preparing for Unknown Unknowns
The important lesson to learn from COVID-19 is not that we need to be prepared for pandemics: it’s that we need to be prepared for unexpected, high-impact events, whatever they may be. Any particular one of these events is too unlikely to plan for, but taken collectively, there’s a reasonable chance that one of them […]
Guest Blog: Accelerating Adoption of Machine Learning in the Financial Services Industry
Machine Learning (ML) is such a powerful new set of technologies, opening up so many business possibilities, that it’s sometimes difficult to imagine how best to put it to use. The possibilities are overwhelming, and there is little history to build on. In this post Baran Karlidag ties ML to the specific challenges that financial […]
Increasing Digital User Engagement in the Insurance Industry
Like other industries, insurance must respond to rising customer expectations for digital interactions. In this post, Tony Jacob, Amazon Web Services’ Worldwide Insurance Business Development Manager, explains how insurers can deepen their relationships with customers by engaging them digitally. Interestingly, he finds that the challenges have less to do with the digital interactions themselves, and […]
Is Your Cloud Journey Stuck in the Value Gap?
Your cloud migration was off to a good start: you set out with a clear plan, used the “Six Rs” to segment your workloads by the different strategies of moving to the cloud, and have closely tracked core metrics like number of applications migrated. However, your stakeholders have become increasingly doubtful as to whether the […]
Guts
Can I speak frankly? Leadership requires guts. There comes a time when a leader has enough information and has mitigated enough risks to move forward with any urgent decision. That’s the moment when the leader must proceed boldly and inspire the rest of the organization to act.
Guest Blog: Raising the IT IQ – Insights from Kmart
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosopher
Guest Blog: The Consolidated Audit Trail and the Cloud
As an Enterprise Strategist at Amazon Web Services, I have spent the last 3 years of my professional life talking to leadership teams of financial services institutions (FSI) from across the globe. It’s always of great interest to me that while no two customers are alike, the challenges are near-identical the world over. From my […]
Governance in the Cloud and in the Digital Age: Part Two
In my last post, I talked about one type of governance—the make-a-rule-and-enforce-it governance style, which applies to standardization, controls, compliance, and other areas that can be handled through general rules. For that type of governance, the digital world changes nothing aside from making it substantially more effective.









