AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog
Author: Phil Le-Brun
Phil Le-Brun is an Enterprise Strategist and Evangelist at Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this role, Phil works with enterprise executives to share experiences and strategies for how the cloud can help them increase speed and agility while devoting more of their resources to their customers. Prior to joining AWS, Phil held multiple senior technology leadership roles at McDonald’s Corporation. Phil has a BEng in Electronic and Electrical Engineering, a Masters in Business Administration, and an MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice.
CTO: The Evolving Role of the Chief Trade-Off Officer
“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? […]
Prioritising Business Value Creation from Data
With data at the centre of every application, process, and business decision, nearly every organisation I talk to describes a quest to become more data-driven to discover and act on insights rapidly. They know there is gold to be found within the troves of their data, but—frustratingly—it usually doesn’t materialise in a timely way for […]
SCM: Supply Chain Muscling or Modernization?
In my customer conversations, Supply Chain Management (SCM) has become almost as constant a theme as people and agility. The last two years of pandemic and other disruptive events, along with the necessity to achieve sustainability objectives, have shocked companies into realising that they don’t necessarily know as much about their supply chains as they […]
Taking Inspiration from Others: Transformation at DB Systel Part 2
In the first blog post, René Schneider and Andrea Sturm described the why and how of DB Systel’s transformation journey. Here they dive into how their organisation is now structured and some of the steps taken to achieve this state. It’s not a pattern that can be cut-and-pasted, but I find inspiration and insights in […]
Taking Inspiration from Others: Transformation at DB Systel Part 1
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 […]
The CPO-CIO Partnership Part 3: You get what you reward
“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 […]
Learners lead, leaders learn: The case for technology fluency in the C-Suite
“The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice.” —Brian Herbert, Author It’s easy to think of life as linear stages. Where did you go to school? What do you do for a living? What are your retirement plans? These stages are interspersed […]
The CDO: Chief Disappearing Officer
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” —John Quincy Adams I have been privileged to meet executives from every sector, many with the newer title of “CDO.” The “D” usually stands for Digital or Data. Here’s my observation from seeing great CDOs in […]
The CPO-CIO Partnership Part 2: Taking the Gloves Off
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 […]
Activating ML in the Enterprise: An Interview with Michelle Lee, VP of Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Labs
In the previous blog post I explored with Michelle K. Lee some of the societal impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). In this post I dive into the patterns Michelle has seen organisations implement to take advantage of the promises of ML. ―Phil Some surveys show a gap between an understanding of […]