AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

All organisations are perfectly aligned to get the results they get. —Stephen R. Covey, Educator and Author My first blog post on untangling your organisational hairball describes six focus areas to increase organisational agility. The first is to be highly aligned. As the Cheshire Cat remarked in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “If you don’t know […]

Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more. —Jeff Bezos, Executive Chairman of Amazon Traditional organizations focus on optimizing efficiency, trying to specialize and maximize the use […]

You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error. —Tim Harford, Economist Read any contemporary article on organisations and within the first few sentences the word, “agile” appears at least once. Some articles suggest achieving agility with a new target operating model (TOM), […]

In the dynamic realm of software development, fostering a positive developer experience is critical to organizational success. However, certain practices inadvertently sabotage this experience, hindering productivity and innovation. Let’s examine these pitfalls and explore actionable strategies for IT leaders to overcome them and ensure a vibrant and efficient development ecosystem that attracts and retains talent. […]

Transformation is not a destination; it’s a journey of continuous growth and self-discovery. —Tony Robbins I used to run regularly until life got in the way. I now intend to spend a boatload of money on fitness gear and fit running around all my other activities, probably starting in the new year. I anticipate being […]

Some of us like to use the holiday season and early part of the new year to step back from day-to-day activities and reflect. It’s a good time to plan a bit for the coming year and catch up on what others are doing and thinking. For me it’s also a chance to work my […]

Happy holidays to everyone! During this time, I like to look back on the year in AWS Enterprise Strategy Blog posts to see what themes have emerged. This blog addresses the concerns and challenges voiced by executives during the Enterprise Strategy team’s approximately 1,500 annual meetings with AWS customers. Reflecting on these important topics reveals […]

Sustainability has become a board-level topic. In Europe, it is a top-ten concern for CEOs who see it as one of the important, if not the most important, long-term risks that need to be managed. CIOs are looking for options to reduce their IT estates’ carbon footprints, and using technology to reduce carbon throughout the […]

One year ago we published our first research report on the role of Chief Data Officers (CDOs). The renowned Tom Davenport, in partnership with MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium (CDOIQ), was commissioned to conduct a global study of CDOs across industries, tenures, and stages of the data journey. At the time I […]

According to the worldwide bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, people make decisions either intuitively or logically. Intuition leads to fast decisions; rational thinking leads to slow decisions. In organizations, it’s the other way around. Intuition leads to long decision-making processes; data- and fact-driven decisions lead to shorter processes. In […]