AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog
Tag: Experience Story
Bias for action – Take the first step
“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step” ~Martin Luther King Jr. Most of the time enterprises have little trouble identifying which problems and opportunities to focus on but then succumb to analysis paralysis. The key question, which I have faced in the past as a CTO and now hear […]
We All Start Somewhere
I began my career as many do in technology, as a developer. I delivered SaaS solutions to simplify how our customers used our products at CIGNA and to increase the effectiveness of automotive dealership digital marketing and operations at Dealer.com. As I began to lead teams, my foundation as a software engineer helped keep me […]
How Can Government Grow and Recruit Digital Talent? The Case of the UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency
This blog is adapted from a conversation with Tom Brewer, Head of Service Creation, UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, and Matthew Lewis, Chief Architect, UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, moderated by Mark Schwartz, Director, Enterprise Strategy, AWS. The discussion, which was a part of the European Government Delegation Programme at re:Invent 2018, focused on how governments can […]
Switching Costs and Lock-In
It’s no surprise that organizations are worried about becoming locked in to their cloud provider. After all, the history of IT is full of examples of vendors taking advantage of high switching costs to impose restrictive licensing terms and to increase prices. But I think that the cloud is different—and in fact, is making it […]
The Power of Constraints
A constraint is a limitation that’s placed upon us. In this post we’ll look at three different types of constraints—time constraints, resource constraints, and guardrails—and explore how each of them can be used to drive innovation, speed, and efficiency. Using Time Constraints to Focus on the Things That Matter In their post on The Two-Week […]
On Failure: A conversation with today’s enterprise cloud leaders
Last month, we published a series of video interviews with C- level executives on their approaches to people and culture, while leading their organizations through the cloud journey. In this blog series I’m summarizing these perspectives, to share what I think are key lessons from these insightful discussions. In my last blog, I focused on the theme […]
Developing Next Level Leaders: A Conversation with Today’s Enterprise Cloud Leaders
As an Enterprise Strategist at AWS I get to work with executives from the world’s largest organizations as they drive digital transformation efforts. What may come as a surprise is that we tend to talk less about the technology and more about the people, processes, and culture needed to enable business transformation. A couple of […]
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 […]
Using a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) to Transform the Entire Enterprise
Large enterprises beginning a transformation journey often find that they already have pockets of transformation that have escaped notice. But why haven’t good practices spread from these isolated corners of the enterprise and transformed the rest of the organization? I think the answer is that transforming the whole of the enterprise requires…well, a large transformation. […]
Cloud-Based Agility in Responding to Disasters
When we talk about enterprise agility in the cloud, we’re often talking about achieving it through DevOps or other Agile software delivery approaches — about the ability to quickly provision infrastructure, load it up with deployed software, receive fast feedback from users, and scale up and scale down instantaneously. But software agility is only one type of […]