Let your people find the
path to success
When Mark Schwartz became CIO of US Citizenship
and Immigration Services (USCIS) at the Department
of Homeland Security in 2010 – taking charge of 2,000
people and a $600 million annual budget – he wondered
how on earth he was going to make such a vast
organization move.
"The IT department was releasing to production on an
18-month cycle, the transformation program had spent
about $1 billion on a software effort that had so far
yielded no results and there was another project where,
for the previous four years, 21 people had done nothing
but assemble a bunch of documents. It would be fair
to say it was a low-frequency organization – one where
change happens very slowly," Schwartz told an audience
of executives at the AWS Summit in London in May.
That just wasn't good enough for an organization which
is often required to respond at breakneck speed to
hastily-announced policy changes by its political masters.
But move it did. By the time of his departure in 2017 to
become Enterprise Strategist at AWS and an acclaimed
business strategy author, Schwartz and his team had
overseen a remarkable transformation at USCIS. "Some
of our systems were deploying to production three or
four times a day rather than once every year and a half.
We'd created rapid response teams we could field around
the country and we were running hackathons that
produced new applications every time. And if we can do
it at Homeland Security, you can too," he said.
Mark Schwartz is an Enterprise
Strategist at Amazon Web Services
and the author of The Art of
Business Value and A Seat at the
Table: IT Leadership in the Age
of Agility.
