Tag: Best Practices

In the last post we talked about anti-patterns that often get in the way of enterprise digital transformation. In this post we’ll cover some good patterns. We call them Shrink, Strangle, Confirm, Cohere, Omit, Shorten, and Embed. Pattern 1: Shrink Reduce the size of deliverables. Make large projects into small projects. Reduce the amount of […]

Our Enterprise Strategy team meets with many hundreds of enterprise customers every year. We are able to see patterns in their digital transformations—ways of practicing and thinking about IT that work, and ways that don’t. In this post I will discuss some of the anti-patterns we encounter—IT mental models and traditional behaviors that just don’t […]

Tenet: (n) A principal or belief, especially one of the main principles of a religion or philosophy. These tenets are held by the group. To be a member in good standing, you are expected to hold to its particular teaching. In my role as an AWS Enterprise Strategist I travel the world working with leaders […]

Before I joined AWS several months ago, I was the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), one of the 15 operational component agencies of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It was my first and only foray into government — prior to that role, I had been a CIO and CEO of commercial-sector companies. How […]

Galapagos Islands “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.” -Charles Darwin We’re constantly inventing and improving at AWS. And, while we currently offer customers more than 90 services (with many, like EC2, also providing a wide variety of sub-choices), the pace of our […]

Automation is good, so long as you know exactly where to put the machine. -Eliyahu Goldratt I’ve spent time with hundreds of IT executives over the past several years, many of whom are in the process of implementing cloud-first operating models in their enterprises. Among the countless things I’ve learned from these conversations, two things are […]

“Tenet: a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true; especially: one held in common by members of an organization, movement, or profession.”– Merriam-Webster Making a large-scale transition to the cloud means that many development, operations, and security processes are no longer applicable — or, they’re dramatically altered in the cloud. For example, AWS provides programmatic […]

Every successful business transformation program I’ve been a part of has had a group of people dedicated to driving it. I’ve written a number of pieces in my e-book of cloud best practices around the role a cloud center of excellence can play in modern day transformation, and today I’m delighted to add a perspective […]

If there was no intentional walks, the guy would just walk him anyway, unintentionally intentionally walk him. You see a lot more of that than what meets the eye. -George Brett I often write about how I believe businesses can be transformed using the cloud, and that doing so is a Journey that takes time. […]

“I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” — Jimmy Dean In my last post, I introduced some patterns I’ve observed within large enterprises that have implemented cloud-first policies. These enterprises have reversed the burden of proof from “Why should we use cloud?” to “Why shouldn’t we […]