Tag: Cultural Change

We often advise AWS customers embarking on digital transformations to consider that cloud migration is part of digital transformation, and digital transformation must be driven by business outcomes. The effectiveness of your governance programs determines the success of your cloud migration and digital transformation. There will be an end to the cloud migration portion of […]

 “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist & philosopher   Thinking is hard; energy intensive even. Perhaps that’s the reason we obsess about food. One estimate indicates we make over 200 food-related decisions a day. Another popular internet statistic boldly states that the average human […]

“Stop trying to make everyone happy. You’re not chocolate” – Anon As a distant observer of the art of being a DJ, I believe I can make their jobs easier. My cunning plan is to replace all those complex sliders on their mixing decks with binary switches. Volume: yes or no? Bass: on or off? […]

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. —”The 12 Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto” In the early days of my career, the success of my IT projects was measured by delivering on time, within budget, and with sufficiently good quality. “Sufficient” often meant that hundreds of […]

Although still challenging and important, technology is often the easier part of digital transformation. As it turns out, the people part is the most critical and is often overlooked and under-appreciated. In an earlier blog post—‘The Why’—we discussed the goal of digital transformation and several critical attributes successful digitally-transformed organizations have in common. Many of […]

Background As an Enterprise Strategist at AWS, I spend the majority of my time in two key areas when I meet with customers: all things digital transformation—people, process, technology, culture, aligning technology investments to business outcomes, cloud migration, organizational change, etc.; and security, compliance, risk, and privacy topics, due to my experience as a former […]

Pick an organisation to transform into a modern, agile, and self-organised equivalent. Would you pick one of the biggest transportation companies in the world which happens to be a German state-owned, 150-year-old railway organisation with Works Councils? Probably not, and yet DB Systel, part of Deutsche Bahn, shows us that any organisation given the right […]

“Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.” — From the Agile Manifesto Since my blog post on the Chief People Officer (CPO) and CIO partnership, a new urgency has emerged—popularly named the “great resignation”—triggered by a demand for skills, a search […]

Overview Throughout the year, we write blog posts on whatever topics seem to be most important to the AWS customer executives we speak to. Each of us on the Enterprise Strategy team holds 100-200 customer meetings a year, generally at the most senior executive levels, to try to help with their challenges in digital transformation—cultural […]

The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back. —Peter Senge       A CIO is hired and charged with “fixing IT.” They launch a major reorganisation based on a desire to be an agile, digital-first, data-enabled, platform-based organisation (thank you, Dilbert). IT-staffed product teams are created, although bereft of the outsourced infrastructure […]