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.
• Barclays Bank instituted a common planning and road-mapping process across multiple business lines, engaging business executive, technology, business systems planning, governance, finance, risk and control, service delivery and operations, and in-country technology teams globally, which resulted in more than 60 synergies identified across business units.
• Wells Fargo established "Living Target Architectures" to provide a clear "line of sight" between the business needs and strategies to the IT implementations as well as to document the underlying technology and road maps to aid in planning and budgeting activities.
• Skandia International created a transformation program, led by EA and bringing business and IT leaders together to revamp both IT's business systems and the IT organization model supporting them. 

So . . . is your EA function:

• Demonstrably changing or improving your business?
• Using business or information architecture in an innovative way?
• Making innovative use of tools and frameworks?
• Creating greater technology agility?
• Providing a "hotbed" for innovation?
• Or doing anything else you think is making an impact . . .

. . . then we want to hear from you!

Your submission will be judged by your peers — a jury of practicing EAs from the Forrester Leadership Boards' Enterprise Architecture Council reviewing "blind entries." These peers understand how hard it is for EA teams to make an impact and immediately recognize when a submission shows a breakthrough that others can learn from. 

Submit here. The submission process will close May 31, with five winners announced in September.