For our recent 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. Organizational models, drivers for EA, breadth and depth of completeness of EA work, and even how members of the EA team spend their time are all covered in this comprehensive survey.

The data reinforces what many readers of A&G have come to accept about the current state of the EA discipline, that perceptions of EA cannot easily be put into a nice, neat box. Not surprisingly, it reveals that each company and even each person/role within a company can have a different take on what EA is, what it does, how it influences their organization and the value it brings. Implementation models vary accordingly. In the webinar Alex talked about the “Archetypes of EA” model as a way to help organizations sort that out.

There are also some other interesting implications of what we see in the data, particularly as it relates to current EA weaknesses and the areas where EA can have the biggest impact moving forward. I don’t want to steal Alex’s thunder by revealing too much here, but I do intend to ask Alex to share his thoughts on what it means to the EA group and to an organization for the EA group to engage more fully with the business. I also anticipate some lively discussion about business and information architecture and how to approach it.

UPDATE: You can now watch the replay of this webinar here

George Paras
Editor-in-Chief
Architecture & Governance Magazine