Mark Schwartz

Enterprise Strategist, AWS

Mark Schwartz is an iconoclastic CIO and a playful crafter of ideas, an inveterate purveyor of lucubratory prose. He has been an IT leader in organizations small and large, public, private, and nonprofit. As the former CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, he provoked the federal government into adopting Agile and DevOps practices. He is pretty sure that when he was the CIO of Intrax Cultural Exchange he was the first person ever to use business intelligence and supply chain analytics to place au pairs with the right host families. Mark speaks frequently on the role of the CIO, innovation in IT, and Agile and DevOps approaches in challenging and low-trust environments. With a BS in computer science from Yale, a master’s in philosophy from Yale, and an MBA from Wharton, Mark is either an expert on the business value of IT or just confused and much poorer.

Mark is the author of The Art of Business Value, which—he is proud to report—has been labeled by his detractors “The Ecclesiastes of Product Management,” and “Apocryphal.” The book takes readers on a journey through the meaning of bureaucracy, the nature of cultural change, and the return on investment of an MBA degree, on the way to solving the great mystery…what exactly do we mean by business value and how should that affect the way we practice IT? Mark promises that his new book, Seat at the Table, is more canonical and less apocryphal.

Mark is the winner of a Computerworld Premier 100 award, an Amazon Elite 100 award, a Federal Computer Week Fed 100 award, and a CIO Magazine CIO 100 award, which strongly suggests that there are less than 99 other people you could better spend time reading.

Check out his presentation of IT Leadership at the DOES 2016 conference:

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The Art of Business Value (audiobook)

New!
Do you really understand what business value is? Information technology can and should deliver business value. But the Agile literature has paid scant attention to what business value means—and how to know whether or not you are delivering it. This problem becomes ever more critical as you push value delivery toward autonomous teams and away from requirements “tossed over the wall” by business stakeholders. An empowered team needs to understand its goal!

A Seat at the Table & The Art of Business Value – Two Book Bundle

For the first time, enjoy Mark Schwartz's two books on IT leadership in the modern enterprise world in one bundle. A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value pave the path for the modern CIO and IT department.

A Reader’s Guide to A Seat at the Table

A Reader's Guide to A Seat at the Table is intended to add another dimension to the original book. This reader's guide walks through A Seat at the Table chapter by chapter.

The guide includes additional material for each chapter on:
• What has changed between the Waterfall/contractor-control world and the Agile world.
• The key points of the chapter.
• The concrete actions that IT leaders should take away from the chapter.
• Questions to help stimulate further debate.
• And more.

A Seat at the Table (audiobook)

Available now!

It’s not enough to say that the CIO is the geek who wears the suit, IT leaders must, now more than ever, take a seat at the table. In A Seat at the Table, CIO Mark Schwartz explores the role of IT leadership as it is now and opens the door to reveal IT leadership as it should be—an integral part of the value creation engine. With wit and an easy style, Schwartz reveals that the only way to become an Agile IT leader is to be courageous—to throw off the attitude and assumptions that have kept CIOs from taking their rightful seat at the table. CIOs, step on up, your seat at the table is waiting for you.

Thinking Environments

While the traditional IT organization is structured into functional silos, DevOps relies on empowered, cross-functional teams. Is it possible to blend the two approaches and work within the traditional structure? Or do you need to restructure your organization to support DevOps? This paper discusses ways to approach organization with DevOps in mind.