AWS Executive in Residence Blog

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 […]

The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved. —C. Northcote Parkinson: Parkinson’s Law of Triviality   In my last blog post I covered issues inherent in freeing up time to become more agile. In this post I’ll get into some ways of eliminating […]

Introduction by Mark Schwartz Back around the end of 2018 we ran a series of blog posts on the implications of the cloud on cost structure, where we discussed some of the interesting and more subtle consequences of changing fixed costs to variable. In particular, as I pointed out, the cloud and DevOps let you […]

Introduction by Mark Schwartz In several earlier posts I discussed new strategies for governance in the cloud and the digital world in general. In the first, I talked about the kind of governance that requires standardization and rules. In the second, I wrote about governing projects and investments. The underlying point of these posts was […]

A person who chases two rabbits catches neither. —Confucius “I need to transform my organisation to become more agile, but I don’t have enough people or time.” Does this ring a bell? As organisations look to evolve their culture and adopt supporting cloud-based technologies, one significant challenge is how to do this while also keeping […]

In my last post I talked about the need for leaders to have guts—in the sense of being willing to make decisions under uncertainty once they’ve gathered enough information. But that’s not the end of the story. In this post I want to talk about gutsy management of vendor relations. In the next post I’ll […]

As a previous customer and current enterprise strategist for Amazon Web Services (AWS), I’ve seen that although no two companies are the same, IT challenges are extremely similar across the industry spectrums. One of those challenges I faced in my past roles was the sheer amount of time, cost, and frustration of managing database software […]

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 […]