Break through the bureaucracy to speed digital transformation

Doing digital transformation better with monkeys, razors, and sumo wrestlers

At many companies entrenched bureaucracies can slow the pace of change, which often throttles digital transformation. In this episode of the podcast, Mike Kavis sits down with AWS’s Mark Schwartz to talk about Mark’s new book, “The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler.” In it, Mark uses the personas of the monkey (provoke and observe), the razor (cut through the fat), and the sumo wrestler (balance the forces) to illustrate how managers can engage in activities that can help untangle bureaucratic quagmires and speed digital transformation. Mark also gives advice on how to de-risk transformation: Encourage skunkworks projects that can make transformation easier and faster.

There's a principle in bureaucracy. If you have a control that you want to implement, and there is a simple way to do it that doesn't take much work, and a hard way to do it that involves a lot of work, choose the simple way.Mark Schwartz is an enterprise strategist and evangelist at AWS. He works with enterprise technology executives to strategize on how they can leverage cloud to increase their speed and agility. Mark has been an IT leader in both the government and the private sector, and he is the former CIO of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services for the Department of Homeland Security.

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