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.
Outsourcing in the Age of Agile: Call to Action
Tom Godden and Phil Le-Brun Where does passion and innovation come from in your organization? From the top? From a particular department or individual? From a supplier? We would hazard a guess that it’s probably not the latter—so why do many companies’ investments imply otherwise? We believe there is an opportunity to reassess how outsourcing […]
The Chief People Officer—The CIO’s Partner in Change
“We need to be more agile. CIO, make it so.” This statement might work in Star Trek, but in the real world, it does nothing to create organisational agility and resilience. When talking to C-suite audiences about agility, it’s commonly the chief people officers (CPO) who lean into the discussions. They appreciate agility as […]
Making Artificial Intelligence Real
“We need to be an AI-enabled company.” Replace the “AI” with any technology from history and this comment becomes a common refrain across businesses lured by the promises of new technology and fuelled by FOMO (a fear of missing out). As enterprise strategists and former CXOs who have lived through many “technology is the solution, […]
Four Anti-patterns When Establishing Centres of Excellence
In most organizations, the bottleneck is at the top of the bottle. —Peter Drucker Should technology be centralised or decentralised in an organisation? An easy question to ask, and one where leaders can talk themselves into believing there is a simple solution to a normally messy problem. If you accept that organisations are complex […]
Organising for Data
Best practices usually aren’t. —Peter Thiel, Entrepreneur I generally dislike the phrase best practice. It implies that a single truth has been discovered for something which cannot be improved upon. It engenders a complacency that, once the practice is implemented, thinking and innovation can stop. This goes for organisational models too. Business cases that […]
The Management Trap: Time for a Rethink
To manage one must lead. To lead, one must understand the work that he and his people are responsible for. —Edwards Deming We have a problem. Proclamations about the cloud, agility, and digital transformation hide the growing gap between the speed of the outside world and the speed inside organisations. My colleague Gregor Hohpe […]
Making Time to Change: Freeing Up Time
The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved. —C. Northcote Parkinson: Parkinson’s Law of Triviality In my last blog post I covered issues inherent in freeing up time to become more agile. In this post I’ll get into some ways of eliminating […]
Making Time to Change, Part 1
A person who chases two rabbits catches neither. —Confucius “I need to transform my organisation to become more agile, but I don’t have enough people or time.” Does this ring a bell? As organisations look to evolve their culture and adopt supporting cloud-based technologies, one significant challenge is how to do this while also keeping […]
Creating Psychological Safety: The Building Block for Agility
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. ― Ernest Hemingway At a discussion on the characteristics of modern agile organisations, a chief people officer asked how psychological safety could be created in the workplace. In the moment an answer eluded me. The topic came up again as […]
Guest Blog: Raising the IT IQ – Insights from Kmart
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosopher