Enterprise Architecture

One of the winners of this year’s Forrester/Infoworld Enterprise Architecture Awards segmented their EA practice into two disciplines: Innovation Architecture and Effectiveness Architecture. These two words describe the range of winners selected by our judges.

Before I announce the winners, let me tell you about why these two words are significant. The Forrester/Infoworld EA Awards have always sought to uncover programs that impact their business through the insight and value that only EA can provide. But many EA programs struggle with this – and the reason for this struggle lies more in themselves than in their context. Bottom line: They focus on “doing architecture” or on “being smart technical experts.” Many talk about being more business-focused but aren’t willing to change their thinking or how they engage with their business.

The five winners of this year’s awards have changed their approach to EA and delivering business impact, and the results show.

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Chess and the Art of Enterprise is now also available as PDF for those who like to read it on a device instead of on paper. This version looks exactly like the paper version (which means: more elegant than the iBook). … Continue reading →

Enterprise architects face more exciting — and greater — challenges as the age of the customer takes off. But technology invention, innovation, and spending are notoriously cyclical. In fact, our first tech trends report in 2009 predicted a boom cycle through 2016. And we have seen this — with social, mobile, cloud, analytics, and big data, to name just the obvious ones. A big finding of our research however is this: The Age Of The Customer has changed the classic technology investment cycle. For example, technology management’s spend will grow about 5% in North America in 2016. This is a decent pace. However, spend on business technology — the things that let firms win, serve, and retain customers — will be double that!

All this new money will shift the focus of investment from point solution inventions toward “end-to-end innovation” by 2018. And by end-to-end, we mean across the customer life-cycle and customer journeys as opposed to classic ‘enterprise integration’. This shift will happen in three phases:

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