AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

Every Board of Directors should be asking their executive team how they plan to deal with digital disruption. Even if a company is not yet facing disruption, it surely soon will be. And leaving it up to chance or just proceeding with the status quo is not a viable alternative.

The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived. —Robert Jordan “Survival” is a reoccurring word in the lexicon of change management. It implies a fight to the death, an existential mission against overwhelming odds and adversary. It’s not a bad metaphor for what we call digital transformation […]

Internet was the future and the dot-com boom was just around the corner. I had just landed a job as a developer before I even graduated. I was looking forward to learning Java, working on some e-commerce projects, and being a part of the next dot-com success story. Optimism was in the air. Then, on […]

The AWS Enterprise Strategy team helps executives at large AWS enterprise customers with their nontechnical impediments to digital transformation and the cloud. We try to bring our experience as senior IT leaders, as well as what we’ve learned from helping other customers and from the IT thought leader community, to bear on the challenges faced […]

In business school, we learned that companies need to develop sustainable competitive advantages. To build value for the long term, you needed to develop distinct competencies that your competitors would not be able to imitate, and then find a way to apply them as an advantage in the markets in which you compete. For some […]

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -Arthur C. Clarke

It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results. —Walter Bagehot The Project Management Office: From Technology Spectator to Enterprise Enabler A topic which several customers have raised is the role of Project Management Offices (PMOs) in agile organisations. The question is normally about the PMO’s relevance in the […]

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. — Goodhart’s law As a developer fresh out of school, the first two service level agreements (SLAs) that I was accountable for were on-time delivery (OTD) and first time right (FTR). While the intention of the first time right measure was to reduce rework […]

Managers don’t solve simple, isolated problems; they manage messes. -Russell L. Ackoff By education and hobbies, I am an electronics engineer. Most problems I face in this domain can be solved through the application of mathematical principles and known solutions. Complex problems can be decomposed into multiple simpler problems and solved in the same way, […]

It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change. —Charles Darwin From childhood, our amazing brain trains itself to recognise patterns. We use this capability to accelerate decision-making, saving us addressing every problem as if new. To apply patterns we ingest, filter, and interpret data using […]