Tag: Reinvention

The roles of the CFO and CIO have been subtly changing. In many enterprises, these roles had veered away from the strategic focus that one would expect from CXOs. But to succeed in the digital world, as I discuss in my book War & Peace & IT, enterprises must let their CIOs and CFOs re-establish […]

There’s a disturbing trend in business today of shorter and shorter company lifespans: the average tenure of an S&P company today is a mere 15 years, compared to 67 years in the 1920s.1 Moreover, in the last 20 years the number of domestic companies on the US Stock Exchange has dropped by half.2 While there are a […]

First in a two-part series In many of our conversations with customers, we hear talk of a “frozen middle”—middle managers in IT who are reluctant to change and either block or slow down attempts at transformation. The idea is that senior leadership wants to gain the benefits of the cloud and digital transformation while line […]

A frequent topic in our conversations with enterprise leaders is just how difficult it is to find people with the right skills for the digital age. We often suggest that their go-to-strategy should be to grow talent internally, developing the skills of people they already employ (an earlier blog post covers this subject as well). But […]

By Aleksandar Simovic Introduction by Mark Schwartz Serverless computing (for example, the capabilities offered by AWS Lambda) is not just a new technology. Its implications—not yet widely understood—include a deep impact on enterprise strategy. Essentially, serverless computing completes the transformation of IT platforms to a utility, something like electricity: whenever you need a little bit […]

by Aleksandar Simovic Introduction by Mark Schwartz, AWS Enterprise Strategist In a post a few months ago titled Micro-Optimization: Activity-Based Costing for Digital Services, I pointed out that serverless computing in the cloud raises the possibility for us to optimize our costs at an extremely granular level, the level of individual functions within an application. Essentially, […]

Our enterprise strategy blog—like the rest of Amazon and AWS—is oriented around the expressed needs of our customers. We write about the issues and challenges facing the enterprises we meet with, and try our best to give them new ways of framing problems, of anticipating the future of IT, of thinking about the cloud and […]

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing highlights from my conversations with seven leaders around their perspectives on innovation at scale when it comes to people and organization. Our dialogues with these leaders, from both commercial enterprises and the public sector, explore how these individuals cultivate next level leaders, how they deal with failure, […]

Customers often ask us how Amazon manages to sustain its pace of innovation. It is truly an amazing pace: on average, AWS releases a major new feature or service approximately once every five hours, day and night, 365 days a year. Since 90–95% of our roadmap comes from what customers tell us they need, you […]

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 […]