AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog
Tag: Cultural Change
Miners Extract More Value from the Cloud When They Transform Their Cultures
Jonathon Dixon, Global Head of Mining & Resources, Amazon Web Services Introduction by Thomas Blood, AWS Enterprise Strategist and Evangelist Until the 1930s, my family owned and operated gold, silver, and copper mines in Colorado. I have a fondness for mining, based on the stories my father shared with me about the people who extract […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Getting Started with Training for the Cloud
Enterprise executives contemplating a move to the cloud sometimes worry that their current employees will not be up to the job. After all, the cloud involves a rather different set of practices and technologies, and making the most of the cloud through DevOps, infrastructure as code, automated security and compliance guardrails, and so on requires […]
3 Reasons You Should Document Your Culture and Hire for Culture Fit
3 Reasons You Should Document YourCulture and Hire for Culture Fit “In our early years, we didn’t talk about culture much. We hadn’t documented it all. We just built a business that we wanted to work in. And, that was great. But the real return on culture happened when we started getting more deliberate about it. […]
The Devolution of IT: How SGN, A Major Utility Provider in Europe, is Modernizing IT Using the Cloud
©Anna-Maria Oléhn https://www.flickr.com/photos/agrajag42/5044627532/ Many people believe that decentralization means loss of control. That’s simply not true. You can improve control if you look at control as the control of events and not people. –Wilbur Creech In my role as Head of Enterprise Strategy for Amazon Web Services (AWS), I’m very fortunate to have the opportunity to […]
5 Things You Can Do To Take Your Teams To The Cloud
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” — Benjamin Franklin In 2014, while VP of Technology at Experian, I put together a small team to rebuild our B2C platform in the cloud. We were immediately confronted with a major obstacle — we lacked the skills and experience to develop solutions in […]
Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast: Friedkin’s Journey Toward XOIT & High-Multiple Cultures
Earlier this week I kicked off a series on Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast, and have been pleasantly surprised by the engagement it’s generated (particularly via comments/likes on LinkedIn) so far. Turns out, cultural transformation is a popular topic, and there seems to be a strong appetite for more stories on this topic. I have […]