AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog
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 […]
Ahead in the Cloud: Alpna J. Doshi, Group CIO of Philips
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 […]
Driving Change from the Top Down: Wielding Organizational Power
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 […]
The Critical Missing Piece of DevOps…And How to Find It
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 […]