Thomas Godden

AWS Enterprise Strategist

"Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Cloud lets you move fast. And if things don’t work, you can tear it down and try again—with minimal cost and risk."

-- Thomas Godden

Thomas Godden, AWS Enterprise Strategist

Getting to know

Thomas Godden, AWS Enterprise Strategist

Tom's goals

As a member of the AWS Enterprise Strategy team, Tom relies on his experience as both a CIO and CTO to consult with other executives on how they can drive higher value from their own migrations to the cloud.

Tom's AWS beginnings

During his career, Tom has led several large-scale digital transformation efforts, including cloud migrations for two different companies. While at Foundation Medicine, a large genomics diagnostic company, Tom led a migration to AWS as part of a strategy to support the rapidly growing business. He saw cloud as a catalyst for transforming the company into a more agile organization, one that would enable increased automation and the adoption of modern application practices such as DevOps. Two years later, Foundation Medicine had grown from $100 million to $500 million in revenue, spurring its acquisition by Roche.

For Tom, cloud creates opportunities for organizations that go far beyond compute and storage capabilities. For example, supported by the AWS cloud, Foundation Medicine was able to rapidly expand into Germany, then China. All in under two years, a rapid pace that would not have been possible before. But to see that opportunity, he had to go from thinking of cloud as just another data center to seeing it as an enabler of an agile business. It’s a philosophy he came to firmly believe in following his first cloud migration project with Wolters Kluwer.

Tom's expertise

Today, Tom shares his perspectives on how to shorten the time-to-value of transformation projects. His first piece of advice: don’t wait to find a perfect time to move to the cloud, because there’s never going to be a perfect time; the path to successful transformation is really just a series of many small steps. New ideas can quickly be validated, mistakes can quickly be torn down, and this rapid iteration creates a flywheel of new value for the business. With each pivot, you learn and move closer to your end goal.

Tom also advises CIOs to pursue smaller projects rather than try to plan out an entire migration at scale. Small victories still drive value and allow teams to build their experience—to see what’s possible. Educating your people and getting them the skills they need through hands-on engagement is critical to the success—and speed—of cloud migrations.

Tom's hobbies

Tom takes the spirit of learning with him during his off time, where his wife is likely to catch him coding late at night, so that he can understand how things work. When not learning about new tech, Tom and his family have a shared passion for traveling around the world—from spending the holidays in Berlin, to experiencing Alhambra and Spain, to taking in the “unbelievable beauty” of the Scottish Highlands.

Tom's career

  • CIO, Foundation Medicine
  • VP, Global Technology Strategy and Chief Architect, Wolters Kluwer
  • CIO, Pharma Solutions, Wolters Kluwer
  • CTO and VP, Technology, Wolters Kluwer
  • Bachelor’s degree, Arizona State University
  • Business transformation
  • Cultural transformation
  • Software development

Blogs

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  • 3P Article

    How Can I Increase the Velocity of my Software Development Organization?

    by Tom Godden, AWS Enterprise Strategist

    Tom Godden is an Enterprise Strategist and Evangelist at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Prior to AWS, Tom was the Chief Information Officer for Foundation Medicine where he helped build the world's leading FDA regulated, cancer genomics diagnostic, research, and patient outcomes platform to improve outcomes and inform next-generation precision medicine. Previously, Tom held multiple senior technology leadership roles at Wolters Kluwer in Alphen aan den Rijn Netherlands and has over 17 years in the healthcare and life sciences industry.

    Read Tom's advice for increasing the velocity of your software development organization.

  • Blog

    Become a high-performing software organization

    By Tom Godden, AWS Enterprise Strategist

    How do you become a high-performing software organization? It is more than just putting new tools in place to manage your CI/CD/CT pipeline. Doing so is like taking the skills you learned from riding a bike and applying them to Formula 1: it will not work. You need to apply new paradigms, take advantage of new capabilities, and shift your mindset to truly become more agile in your product-development process. This starts with having a clear understanding of where you are, and then simplifying your process by using new tools and creating new behaviors.

    Read More

  • Blog

    Two Pizza Teams Are Just the Start, Part 2: Accountability and Empowerment Are Key to High-Performing Agile Organizations

    by Thomas Godden, Enterprise Strategist, AWS

    In my previous blog post, I shared with you why the legacy approach of project and skill-based teams stands in the way of organizations becoming high-performing agile organizations that are able to innovate quickly, bring new ideas to market faster, and deploy advanced technology solutions in less time.

    Read more »

Read more on the AWS Enterprise Strategy blog »

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