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Helping technology leaders achieve their goals through publishing, events & research.

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The New IT Workforce: Harnessing the Power of Community

September 21, 2021 by Mark Schwartz 1 Comment

This post is adapted from A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility.  Accompanying our transition to an Agile IT world, and subtler in its implications, has been the rise of community as a way of practicing IT. This change is due in large part to the rise of open source, but can also be traced to the demographics and inclinations of today’s emerging workforce, as well as to the interdependence of participants in a DevOps model. A successful business can harness this community … [Read more...]

Filed Under: A Seat at the Table, Leadership, Workplace Culture Tagged With: mark schwartz, seat at the table, shadow it, workforce, workplace culture

Playbook to Bust Bureaucracy

August 3, 2021 by Mark Schwartz 1 Comment

So, you’re in an organization, running up against bureaucratic impediments when you try to do what you’re pretty sure is the right thing. Perhaps you’re leading a digital transformation and your company’s bureaucracy is resisting change, fighting to lock in ways of doing things that belong to the days before the Paleolithic era. You’re up against a vast leviathan of a bureaucracy. What should you do? Like many business and technology authors, I’m going to tell you a bunch of stuff based on my … [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Leadership, Organizational Change, The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy, Workplace Culture Tagged With: bureaucracy, delicate art of bureaucracy, leadership, mark schwartz, organizational culture

How to Fix Bureaucracy

August 3, 2021 by Mark Schwartz Leave a Comment

This post is an excerpt from Mark Schwartz's The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy.  There are three things we must do to eliminate bureaucracy’s Kafkaesque aspects. We must make it lean by removing waste and shrinking lead times. We must make it capable of learning; that is, changing as the environment changes and as better ways are found to accomplish goals. And we must make it enabling—that is, helpful as a way to get things done rather than a no-saying, gatekeeping, troll-controlled … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Leadership, Organizational Change, The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy, Workplace Culture Tagged With: bureaucracy, delicate art of bureaucracy, leadership, mark schwartz, organization design

The IT Leader’s Place in the Business

February 9, 2021 by Mark Schwartz Leave a Comment

This post was is an excerpt from the book A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility by Mark Schwartz. In the Agile world, senior IT leadership, and the CIO in particular, must look at their jobs in a new way if they want to secure a seat at the table. A few of the critical characteristics of the new IT leadership role include: Driver of Outcomes Manager of Uncertainty Steward of Assets Contributor Influencer and Salesperson Orchestrator of Chaos Enabler Impediment … [Read more...]

Filed Under: A Seat at the Table, DevOps Community, Leadership Tagged With: a seat at the table, agile, devops, leadership, mark schwartz

The Good and The Bad of Bureaucracy

October 26, 2020 by Mark Schwartz 2 Comments

This post is adapted from Mark Schwartz's The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler. In a previous post I revealed how IT is the biggest, baddest bureaucrat on the block. But to overcome bureaucracy, we need to separate those of its aspects that are problematic from those that are not, and focus our efforts on the former. We must disengage from the metaphysical pathos and reengage in a particular way. Let's now identify the … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books, The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy Tagged With: bureaucracy, business leadership, delicate art of bureaucracy, leadership, mark schwartz

Announcing The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy

October 16, 2020 by Mark Schwartz Leave a Comment

I’m excited to announce the publication of my fourth book, The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler. Despite the whimsical title, it’s about a critical concern of enterprises transitioning to the cloud and trying to thrive in the digital economy. From my meetings with enterprise AWS customers, I know that bureaucracy is often an impediment to digital transformation. It acts to slow down or prevent innovation and adaptation. It … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books, The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy Tagged With: book announcement, business leadership, leadership, mark schwartz, the delicate art of bureaucracy

Making Bureaucracy Lean, Learning and Enabling

September 29, 2020 by Mark Schwartz Leave a Comment

This post is a transcript of Mark Schwartz's DevOps Enterprise Summit- London 2020 presentation.  Hi everyone. My name is Mark Schwartz. I'm an enterprise strategist with Amazon Web Services. I think I've spoken at every one of these DevOps Enterprise Summits since 2014, so I hope you're not getting tired of me yet. I think some of you might also have read one or more of my books. There's The Art of Business Value, A Seat at the Table, and War and Peace and IT.  And the exciting … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books, The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy Tagged With: agile, bureaucracy, delicate art of bureaucracy, devops, enabling, lean, learning, mark schwartz

IT: The Biggest, Baddest Bureaucrats

September 15, 2020 by Mark Schwartz Leave a Comment

This post is an excerpt of Mark Schwartz's The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler.  IT Bureaucracy: Not Fooling Anyone Among the biggest, baddest, bullyingest bureaucrats in a large enterprise are the IT folks. Yes, us, the very IT folks who so hate bureaucracy when we find it imposed on us. Your password, we say, must be in a format that guarantees you’ll never remember it, and you must change it every few … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books, DevOps Community, The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy Tagged With: bureaucracy, business, business agility, business and it, delicate art of bureaucracy, devops for business, leadership, mark schwartz

Three Innovative Funding Models to Enhance DevOps

September 8, 2020 by Mark Schwartz 1 Comment

Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. The traditional project plan tries to manage risks by itemizing them in a register and proposing a mitigation plan for each one. Risks are mitigated to the extent necessary to bring the plan back into line—in other words, to adjust the initiative so the initial business case and plan are maintained. But the uncertainties in the IT domain go deeper—it might be that … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books, War and Peace and IT Tagged With: accounting, agile, budget, devops budgets, financial planning, innovative budgeting models, lean, mark schwartz, war and peace and it

The 3 Real Risks Every Project Manager Should Focus On

September 3, 2020 by Mark Schwartz Leave a Comment

Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. It turns out that people are pretty terrible at assessing probabilities and risk. In my last book, A Seat at the Table, I cited several examples to make this point—examples that I love because even knowing the right answer I still can’t convince myself it is right. The first example had to do with the TV game show Let’s Make a Deal, in which the contestant is asked … [Read more...]

Filed Under: A Seat at the Table, Books, DevOps Community, War and Peace and IT Tagged With: a seat at the table, devops, mark schwartz, project management, risk, risk management, software delivery, war and peace and it

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