Recognizing Excellence in Information Technology Leadership
Last spring, the editors of Architecture & Governance Magazine undertook our annual study of best practices in enterprise architecture and business transformation. In our third year of conducting this survey, we were anxious to see if EA adoption trends in years past were translating into business success today.
Our survey showed increased adoption of metrics for measuring EA success, positive allocation of budgets to drive EA investments, a wide embrace of education and training, and trends toward using EA concepts to drive new business initiatives rather than predominately projecting a cost management stance as in years past.
While the results show that there are positive trends pointing toward an enlightened understanding of EA’s value to the enterprise, there still remains a significant gap between the toil of the architecture team and the recognition of value in the executive suite.
Only 23 percent of respondents say that their executive leadership is actively pushing EA for strategic alignment initiatives, and a sizable 73 percent of organizations are still in the formative stages of enterprise architecture endeavors.
At Architecture & Governance Magazine, we believe that business success is inexorably linked to enterprise architecture capability. By seeking out and publicizing some of the high-performing EA leaders and their teams, we can provide a touchstone for others in the community. By analyzing the paths that they have taken to success, we hope the community as a whole can better apply its formidable EA competence to drive business accomplishment.
It is in this spirit that we present the first “class” of the Architecture & Governance Excellence in Leadership Awards. Here we acknowledge three outstanding individuals and the teams that supported them. Their ability to drive enterprise architecture concepts to the very heart of their organizations has lead to unprecedented success. We offer profiles of two of these leaders: Bill Branch, from Sprint Nextel, and Doug Rousso, from Warner Bros. Additionally, we pay a heartfelt tribute–an EA lifetime achievement award, if you will–to Dick Burk, the retiring chief architect of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Ira Grossman’s praise for Burk is found in the Last Word column at the end of this issue.
While we celebrate these three leaders, we also acknowledge the everyday victories of many in our community. As part of the survey, we asked respondents to anonymously tell us about their successes in the past year:
- “All lines of business projects are governed against the EA standards, best practices, and reference architecture. So to one degree or another, all projects use EA concepts to drive success.”
- “Used EA concepts to prevent multiple products from coming into the company that offered similar functionality.”
- “Implementation of applications portfolio optimization within the organization, along with standards management.”
- “We created a new operating unit. The EA approach allowed us to develop the business organization and processes in concert with the supporting IT. It also introduced new ways of working for the developers and the business team, and showed the flexibility and reuse achievable from SOA.”
- “Every project that goes through the enterprise is reviewed by the EA team to ensure that the potential new technology matches our goforward strategies as an enterprise, and that it is not being siloed in the area that has presented it. This ensures that the right product is being picked that can be leveraged in many ways.”
And so, we say congratulations to Bill, Doug, and Dick for their outstanding accomplishments, and cheers to the larger community for working every day to drive business value and to generate executive awareness of the progress and power of enterprise architecture.
Jonas Lamis is the founding editor of Architecture & Governance Magazine
