Tag: Reinvention

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 […]

Who is accountable for managing the costs of a digital service? Enterprises are increasingly pushing accountability outward to cross-functional teams. There is an important reason for this: teams can make decisions and put them into action quickly, and speed is important. By putting a cross-functional group of people on the same team, the enterprise makes […]

The annual budgeting process leads us to make decisions based on total costs. We assign a budget to a cost category, then spend the year managing to that cost. Our investment management process similarly leads us to think in terms of total costs. We plan against a set of requirements, estimate the total cost, figure […]

By Eddie Murray, Global Oil & Gas Leader, Amazon Web Services Introduction by Mark Schwartz, Enterprise Strategist, AWS As my colleague Miriam McLemore says, large enterprises have innovation in their DNA. There was something innovative they did that got them to be big enterprises in the first place, and probably many innovations along the way. […]

Live blog post from re:Invent 2018, Las Vegas For decades, enterprises have thought of data in terms of the relational database model. It is a brilliant model and has solved many of the data-handling problems of early IT. With a normalized database schema, we could reduce redundancy and bring out the relationships between data items […]

Live blog post from re:Invent 2018, Las Vegas One consistent theme in Werner Vogels’s keynote speech at re:Invent yesterday was that products designed for the cloud are very different from those designed for on-premises hardware. In the first waves of migration to the cloud and cloud-first delivery of new systems, it was natural for all […]

by Jonathon Dixon, Global Head of Mining and Resources, Amazon Web Services Foreword by Thomas Blood: In a preface to another mining-related post, I had mentioned that until the 1930s, my family owned and operated gold, silver, and copper mines in the United States. What I did not mention is why my family no longer owns […]

In previous blog posts I have described anti-patterns of enterprise IT that we often observe in enterprises we work with, and patterns of successful enterprise IT that are their antidotes. To make these patterns and anti-patterns more concrete, I will explain how they have played out at my old organization, US Citizenship and Immigration Services […]

An interesting question arose at one of my customer meetings recently. We were discussing the importance of innovation; in particular, how important it was for technology staff to stay abreast of new technologies to see whether they could add value to the enterprise. We agreed that current best practices suggest conducting rapid experiments to test […]

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 […]