For our last A&G Webinar,  Alex Cullen of Forrester Research joined me to discuss his research on the State of EA in 2010. The research was driven by Forrester’s latest Global Annual State of Enterprise Architecture Online Survey. It included a broad set of questions ranging from details on executive perceptions about EA to specifics on how organizations approached EA.

It’s been more than 5 years since we launched Architecture and Governance Magazine, and the time has come for me to align my thought leadership efforts more closely with my day job(s).  A&G has grown into a great thought leadership publication and user community and under George Paras’ guidance A&G will continue to provide you some of the best thought leadership and best practices articles in the strategic IT planning and Enterprise Architecture space.

Recently, I had the chance to talk with Frank Malta, the Chief Architect of drug manuacturer Merck.  Frank’s EA team has been eagerly pursuing a vision of enterprise wide business capability modeling for a number of years and has generated quite a bit of success.  

Forrester is hosting its annual IT Forum next month in Las Vegas, and I am looking forward to hearing what happens.  Despite the malaise in the economy and a general downturn in conference going over the past year, Forrester has put together an impressive event that is bound to yield some interesting results.

Some of the must hear speakers include:

Since the turn of the decade, forward thinking executives and technologists have pondered how to use enterprise architecture and IT planning processes to drive enterprise strategy.  This has not been an easy road. 
 

In the run up to the Dot Com bubble, IT organizations went on a spending binge.  Most companies purchased technologies without proper due diligence or strategic planning.  By 2000, CIOs had a larger share of the enterprise budget than ever before.  
 

Last week, Forrester Research released The Forrester Wave™: Business Process Analysis, EA Tools, And IT Planning, Q1 2009.  This was the second year that Forrester analyst Henry Peyret led the research, and this wave provides the broadest and most up to date coverage of EA and Strategic IT Planning tools currently available.

If you haven’t met your company’s Enterprise Architecture team, you might want to schedule an introduction. In the year ahead, Enterprise Architecture will become a governing force in IT decision-making. New projects will require EA concurrence, and spending decisions will get hung up in architectural and governance review processes.