Seat at the Table

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 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 move to 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, 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? He promises that A 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 authors you could better spend time reading.

Mark Schwartz is a rare combination: a deep thinker who has also applied lean, Agile, and DevOps principles at the highest level, leading an extraordinary Agile transformation in the US Federal Government at USCIS. In this book, he shows how modern IT lead-ers succeed by driving business outcomes rather than operating an order-taking function. This shift in organizational mindset is critical to any successful technology transformation but requires substantial changes in behavior at every level, and Mark's thorough analysis will prove invaluable to leaders who must execute it.

• Table of ContentsForewordIntroductionPart One: Finding the Table1. Sitting Alone2. Kept from the Table3. Approaching Agilely and LeanlyPart Two: Earning the Seat4. Planning5. Requirements6. Transformation7. Enterprise Architecture8. Build vs. Buy9. Governance and Oversight10. Risk11. Quality12. Shadow ITPart Three: Sitting at the Table13. The CIO's Place at the Table14. Exhortation and Table Manners EndnotesRecommended ReadingAcknowledgements