AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog
5 Steps to Building a Culture of Security
(image www.bluecoat.com) In an earlier blog post, I discussed the importance of building a culture of security rather than thinking of security as just the job of the CISO’s team. In this post, I’d like to discuss some ideas on how to build such a culture, drawing on my experiences at USCIS. As CIO, I […]
Leading from the Middle Part Two: Selling Ideas and Playing Politics
In an earlier post, I described how a transformational leader who is not at the top of the organizational hierarchy can still begin the process of driving change. I left off my description at a critical moment. The change agent has implemented changes within his or her scope of authority, carved out a sandbox […]
Transforming Up and Down: Leading Change from the Middle
opensource.com In several earlier blog posts, I discussed techniques for leading a digital transformation from the top of an organization. In the first of these posts, I discussed how to take organizational power—the power that comes from sitting high in the organizational chart—and, in an ironic twist, use it to lead the organization from a […]
Building a Culture of Security
It is no longer sufficient to leave security to a team of specialists who watch over the enterprise’s risk posture and control it through a set of constraining policies. It is not enough to guard the boundaries of the enterprise’s network with firewalls, or to simply implement sets of controls specified in a compliance framework. […]
The Start-Up Enterprise: Step One
There’s been a lot of industry buzz about digital transformation but little clear information about what it means. What does it mean to be “digital?” How different is it from what we do today? How much of a transformation does going “digital” require? What is clear is that the pace of innovation, change, and disruption […]
Risk is Lack of Agility
In an earlier post, I talked about how risk decisions are often compromised by the status quo bias. In this post, I would like to present an alternative way to think about risk—a way that fits well with today’s business practices. To be precise, I want to try to demonstrate that risk in a business […]
Ahead in the Cloud: My New Book on the Future of Enterprise IT (and My New Role)
“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 […]
Scaling Good Practices across the Enterprise
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 […]
Top-Down Transformation: Shu-Ha-Ri to Go Beyond Command-and-Control
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 […]
What to Expect from Your Analytics Platform
who_is_danny/shutterstock.com 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 […]