AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog
Author: Phil Le-Brun
Phil Le-Brun is an Enterprise Strategist and Evangelist at HAQM 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.
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
Surviving Digital Disruption: Resilience in the Face of Change
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 […]
In Search of Silver Bullets: Moving Beyond Dreaming of Data
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -Arthur C. Clarke
The Project Management Office: From Technology Spectator to Enterprise Enabler
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 […]
Lessons in Embracing Messiness
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, […]
The Agile Organisation: Changing our Worldview
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 […]
Best of Both Worlds: Building an Entrepreneurial Culture in the Enterprise
In our Executive Summit roundtable session at re:Invent 2019, Phil Potloff and I discussed the topic of innovation in large enterprises with executives spanning many industries and public sector organisations. Much has been written about how large companies often lose elements of their original DNA as they grow, including their aptitude to innovate. Given this, […]
Drive Change but Avoid the Chasms
Every change will be met with an equal, opposite, unpredictable change of its own. —Inspired by Isaac Newton In “Today’s CIO—Orchestrator in Chief,” we covered how changes can be introduced into organisations, but only eluded to matching different approaches with different audiences. This approach is similar to how marketers segment customers to target different buying […]