To paraphrase a now-marginalized US political figure: “How you’all doing?”

Every year, Forrester’s Enterprise Architecture team looks at how enterprise architecture, as a practice and a function within business, is doing. We look at everything from how firms organize their EA programs, to where they are getting their support from, what roles exist within the EA team, completeness of architecture and the degree of standardization, expected technology change, and priorities and challenges. We ask the same questions year over year to discern any trends.

On December 9, we’ll be presenting the results of the 2011 State of Enterprise Architecture survey, compiling the inputs from 543 firms across North America, Europe, and Asia/PAC. (Note: this teleconference is for Forrester clients. A separate teleconference will be offered for non-client respondents to this survey.) A wide variety of industries are represented: financial services, manufacturing, retail, business services, and public sector. A few highlights:

• The structure of firms’ EA functions continues to shift – with both centralized and completely decentralized increasing. 
• Architecture staffing continues its growth. The business architect role is one factor driving this growth. 
• Awareness and support by the broader business and IT organization continue to climb – both by the CIO, other IT functions, and by line of business management. 
• Drivers for EA show a significant shift – with “improving business agility” rising to the top. 

Several recent Forrester reports home in on what we call “The Age Of The Customer” in which firms must seek to become customer-obsessed to build differentiation and loyalty. Those firms that embrace this will ramp up investment in four priority areas: 1) real-time customer intelligence; 2) customer experience and customer service; 3) sales channels that deliver customer intelligence; and 4) useful content and interactive marketing. All these needs are technology-infused – wholly dependent on technology and in categories where technology is evolving rapidly. Underlying these investments is the need to master the flow of data about customers: capturing/collecting data about them, analyzing it, distributing to those points of engagement, and, finally, integrating the insights into the customer experience. 

Companies can’t succeed at doing this without a close partnership between the business areas leading the charge and IT. The rate of change of your customers, markets, business opportunities, and technology is simply too fast. Forrester is exploring this theme in our first CIO/CMO joint forum. 

The reality, though, is companies flounder at this marketing-IT partnership. They flounder because of:

• More ideas than capacity. A plethora of desired initiatives are constantly being surfaced – beyond the limits of available budget and with no mechanism to sort them into an achievable plan that IT can deliver on.   

Several recent reports on Forrester.com start with the sentence: "EA organizations often toil out of the limelight . . . " There are fewer and fewer reasons why this should be the case. 

We hear fewer stories of EA teams as purely "the standards police" or with "their heads in the clouds, not producing anything useful." We hear more and more stories of EA teams changing how business and IT plan, taking the lead in application simplification and rationalization, or being the broker for innovation. Infoworld and Forrester want to recognize these success stories with the 2011 Enterprise Architecture Award.

Our 2010 Award winners show the range of ways EA teams are making a difference:

• Discover Financial created an EA repository that aggregates information from its Service Catalog, Fixed Asset, PPM, and Business Goals to provide decision-making insights that saved more than $1M of avoided costs.
• Aetna used its Business Capability Map to combine more than 30 business unit strategies and road maps, highlighting common opportunities and gaps that it then used for its annual planning.

Architects frequently tell us how much they value insights from practitioners like themselves. We at Forrester equally value these insights, as they are the foundation of our research. To serve you and us, we've launched The Forrester Community For Enterprise Architecture Professionals.

The community is open to all, whether you're a Forrester client or not. Check out the community, and you'll see conversations focused on the key challenges that you face – from influencing the thinking of your business execs to revitalizing an IT standards program to asking if application portfolio management (APM) is a responsibility of EA or the IT function supporting apps. Participating architects and Forrester analysts are sharing their perspectives – on these questions, plus other questions like the use of Wikis for architecture standards.

You can use these discussions to get better at your role – plus you'll be able to shape our research agenda by posting your questions or highlighting a topic you think demands further investigation. Our leading analysts – like Jeff Scott, Randy Heffner, Henry Peyret, Galen Schreck, and Gene Leganza – will also post the topics they are working on to get your input on them. 

Here's what you’ll find in The Forrester Community For Enterprise Architecture Professionals:

• A simple platform on which you can pose your questions and get advice from peers who face the same business challenges.

What will business and technology be like in 2020 – and what’s IT’s place in this new world? This is the subject of a teleconference that James Staten and I held for our clients yesterday and also the subject of an upcoming Forrester report.

In this teleconference, we painted a picture of the impact of business-ready, self-service technology, a tech-savvy and self-sufficient workforce, and a business world in which today’s emerging economies dwarf the established ones, bringing a billion new consumers with a radically different view of products and services, as well as in which surging resource costs – especially energy costs – crush today’s global business models. 

In the past, when new waves of technology swept into our businesses – everything from the 1980s’ PCs to today’s empowered technologies – the reaction was the swinging pendulum of “decentralized/embedded IT” followed by “centralized/industrialized IT.” These tired old reactions won’t work in the world 2020. Instead, businesses must move to a model we call Empowered BT.

Empowered BT empowers business to pursue opportunities at the edge and the grassroots – but to balance this empowerment with enterprise concerns. Key to this balance is the interplay between four new “meta roles” – visionaries, consultants, integrators, and sustainability experts – combined with a new operating model based on guidelines, mentoring, and inspection. Also key is IT changing from a mindset in which it needs to control technology to one in which it embraces business ownership of technology decisions.

The teleconference chat window was busy as James and I presented our research. Here are the questions we weren’t able to answer due to time.