Enterprise Architecture is a challenged role in IT. While more than 50% of all IT shops – and all large IT shops (greater than $100M budget) – have an EA practice in some form, most EA teams struggle with defining a mission that is relevant to their business and executing on this mission to produce the benefits their business needs. This struggle leads to frequent re-organizations, struggles for credibility and influence, and often an EA focus on the low-hanging fruit of technology standardization. 

But this is changing. 

Last year, Forrester teamed up with InfoWorld to select five EA programs that were having a measurable impact on their businesses. Our purpose for this awards program was to spotlight highly effective programs that embodied practices that we could all learn from. We found EA programs that were producing results ranging from saving millions of dollars per year in IT expenditures, to guiding IT transformation into business partners, to guiding business planning. 

Today we announced the winners of the 2011 InfoWorld/Forrester Enterprise Architecture Awards. We set out to identify five leading organizations, just like we did last year. But our practitioner judges – last year’s winners – decided that due to the quality of so many submissions, they had to identify six:

• American Express, for how it uses reference architecture and technologies road maps;
• Bayer HealthCare, for how it approaches EA management in a complex organization;
• First Data Corporation, for its buildout of a global EA function to drive efficiency, simplicity, cost effectiveness, and agility;
• The Proctor & Gamble Company, for how its EA practice is leading the company's digitization with a Business Architecture Framework;
• The Singapore Ministry of Education, for its use of EA and IT governance to improve agility, upgrade technology, and lower cost; and
• USAA, for its creation of a Unified Architecture bringing together the dimensions of people, process, technology, and information. 

I want to congratulate these six winning EA programs as well as their sponsors, managers, and staff, for putting together programs we can learn from.

I also want to extend a special thanks to our five judges, the winners of last year's EA Award, for their time wading through pages of documentation and slides:

Jeremy Gray, Chief Technology Officer, Wealth Management Skandia Group; Sherrie B. Littlejohn, Executive Vice President – Enterprise Architecture, Wells Fargo; Richard J. Reese, Vice President, Enterprise Architecture, Discover Financial Services; Inderjit Sandhu, Chief Architect, Barclays Bank; Robert A. Tobin, Head of Business Architecture, Aetna, Inc.