Tag: Best Practices

In this post, John Naylon draws an interesting connection between multi-cloud strategies and outsourcing. I won’t steal his thunder by saying any more! Mark Complexity, interchangeability, and partnership in outsourcing  What do emptying the office wastepaper baskets and manufacturing iPhones have in common? Perhaps not much on first inspection. However, these are both tasks which […]

by Clarke Rodgers, Enterprise Strategist, AWS Enterprise Strategy Over the last several months, one of the most common discussions I have had with members of the C-Suite is around how to effectively report and/or discuss cybersecurity with the organization’s Board of Directors (BoD) and/or Senior Leadership Team (SLT). Background Before I get into the details, […]

“Shadow IT” or “Rogue IT”—I’d venture to say that all IT organizations experience it. It’s tempting for different parts of the business—when they feel that IT isn’t meeting their needs as quickly as they’d like—to find other ways to get things done. The problem is that they might be bypassing important security or availability controls, […]

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. — Goodhart’s law As a developer fresh out of school, the first two service level agreements (SLAs) that I was accountable for were on-time delivery (OTD) and first time right (FTR). While the intention of the first time right measure was to reduce rework […]

“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts—for support rather than for illumination.” —Andrew Lang When it comes to the data, it is culture first and capability second. In my previous post, I talked about how executives can create a data-driven culture in their enterprises. In this post, I am going to dive […]

I believe the fear that led to the deployment of large amounts of resources and budgets to remediate Y2K, followed by the dot-com bubble bust, had an unintended consequence. Many enterprises became extremely conservative when it came to building products, and defaulted to buying off the shelf wherever possible. Today, many enterprise IT teams are […]

“Human behaviour flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.” Plato As with many subjects, Plato was ahead of his time in understanding the challenges of a CIO. In many businesses today, we have excelled at the desire (“We will lead our industry with digital transformation.”) and the emotion (“I’m passionate about transforming our […]

Although new to AWS, I am already hearing similar stories from enterprise customers regarding their challenges as they look to proactively grow and even disrupt their own businesses. While our AWS customers are interested in the technology, their stories more commonly address organisational, people, and process challenges. In this post, I will address some of […]

In my previous post, I examined the modern application and highlighted the typical approach used to build modern applications: Shrink the scope. Choose the right tool for the job. Offload the undifferentiated pieces. Connect the building blocks. Automate everything. AWS continues to build services that make choosing the right tool for the job, offloading the […]

As an Enterprise Strategist, I spend time with customers discussing modern practices and techniques that enterprises are adopting to create business agility. These practices and techniques are also the foundation of today’s “modern application.” However, defining the “modern application” for builders and leaders can be difficult for one very important reason: the “modern application” does […]