AGL 107: War and Peace and IT – Mark Schwartz

About Mark Schwartz Mark Schwartz is an iconoclast and 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 an Enterprise Strategist for Amazon Web Services, he uses his extensive CIO wisdom to advise the world’s largest companies on the obvious: time to moveto the cloud, guys. As the 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 innovation, change leadership, bureaucratic implications of DevOps, and using Agile practices in 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, A Seat at the Table, and War and Peace and IT and 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. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Today We Talked About Mark’s Technology Journey A Seat at the Table Ware and Peace and IT Digital Transformation DevOps Approach vs Scrum IT is part of the business Drive change from the top Spread the good culture Pairing arrangements DoJo Model Mitosis Model Pair Programming’ Pitfalls to avoid during Digital Transformation Changing Culture is an outcome of digital transformation, not a prerequisite. Evaluation of Success Having Confidence in the Results Using Data for Hypothesis and Results The Lean Startup Finish Something Clear Vision Small Execution What can we do in a few days Why Mark wrote each of his books Connect with Mark Twitter War and Peace and IT A Seat at the Table The Art of Business Value I hope you enjoyed this show, please head over to iTunes and subscribe and leave me a rating and review, even one sentence will help spread the word.  Thanks again!