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.

Last week, Gartner Inc released its the 2009 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools report. Led by Robert A. Handler and Chris Wilson, the new Magic Quadrant provides an up to date and broad coverage of currently available EA software.

According to the authors of the report ‘“In both favorable and adverse economic conditions, organizations need visibility into their businesses. By enabling the creation, structuring and analysis of multiple aspects of enterprise architecture (EA), EA tools go far in fulfilling this need”.

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.

In my last post, I discussed how the emergence of Internet technologies are driving down the cost to acquire, understand and act on information.  As a result, traditional processes for many enterprise architecture organizations are requiring a substantial rethinking of strategy.

In this post, we will explore new tools and light processes that traditional EA can use to take advantage of the emergence of Web 2.0 on the nature of today’s firm. 

In 1937, noted economist Ronald Coase penned a short essay titled “The Nature of the Firm”.  Coase was trying to understand why companies had gotten very large as the industrial revolution first emerged and then began to displace our agrarian lifestyles.

A couple of years back, I was attending Gartner Symposium, and the analyst presenter started talking about Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants.  The natives are technology savvy youngsters who have grown up in an always connected, always on world.  Digital Natives find new technologies to be intuitive.  They are at ease in navigating the blogosphere and the social networks.  And they tweet.

While uncertainty in near term economic conditions continues, there appears to be a light on the horizon. With the likely recovery of business activity in the next few quarters, now is the time to seize the initiative on smart technology investment.

I recently took a personality profile test called the Clifton StrengthsFinder. This test measures the presence of talent in 34 categories called "themes." These themes were determined by The Gallup Organization as those that most consistently predict outstanding performance. The greater the presence of a theme of talent within a person, the more likely that person is to spontaneously exhibit those talents in day-to-day behaviors.

In my previous posting on Business Capability Modeling, I synthesized some of the leading perspectives from the analyst community.  Since that posting we have also released a podcast with Frank Malta from Merck on their approach to business capability modeling.

I’ve also heard from our community by email and have seen several interesting threads in the blogosphere that I want to share today:

A note from Jan Nilsson Manager EA, RGDS

Did you know that 80% of all enterprise architecture (EA) initiatives are not completed because they fail to demonstrate “value added” to current business practices?  I recently attended the Troux Directions Federal Users Conference, which made some excellent points on the theme: “How does EA add value?”