In our Forrsights Business Decision-Makers Survey, Q4 2011, we asked business technology leaders to rate IT’s ability to establish an architecture that can accommodate changes to business strategy. While 45% of IT rated its ability positively, only 30% of business respondents did. Clearly, both think there is room for improvement, but business is more concerned about it.

So are we agile? Only 21% of enterprise architects in our September 2011 Global State Of Enterprise Architecture Online Survey reported being even modestly agile, so I think we all know the answer.

What do we do about it? Continue to focus on technology standardization and cost reduction? Give up on that and focus on tactical business needs? Gridlock in the middle because we can’t make the business case to invest in agility? This is the struggle EA organizations face today.

To act with agility, firms must create a foundation for it, and three barriers can get in the way:

• Brittle processes and legacy systems. We all know it this one; the current state mess of processes that cannot adapt to change and legacy systems where everything is connected to everything else, so even the smallest changes have broad impacts. Techniques to overcome this barrier include partitioning the problem into digestible pieces to show incremental progress and short-term payoff.

There are many types of criminals. These include thrill-seeking hackers, politically motivated hackers, organized criminals after financial gain, and state-sponsored groups after financial gain and intellectual property or both.  Any of these have the potential to break these capabilities through information loss, or denial of service. Business processes and their associated transactions need to look at information security as a key component of any architectural design we might create as Enterprise Architects.

Security architecture is dependent on the idea of “security.”  Security by some definitions is the trade-off of convenience for protection.  When I am unloading the car and have an armful of groceries, it's challenging to unlock the front door at the same time. Alternatively I could just leave the front door unlocked but that might invite guests I had not planned for. So I trade convenience for protection.

• Security is often seen as in conflict with business users; however, security is a process that protects the business and allows it to effectively operate.
• Security is in response to perceived business risks.
• Security can be seen as a benefit and a business enabler and can aid organizations to achieve their business objectives.

Just attended a Big Data symposium courtesy of IBM and thought I’d share a few insights, as probably many of you have heard the term but are not sure what it means to you.

No. 1: Big Data is about looking out of the front window when you drive, not the rearview mirror. What do I mean? The typical decision-making process goes something like this: capture some data, integrate it together, analyze the clean and integrated data, make some decisions, execute. By the time you decide and execute, the data may be too old and have cost you too much. It’s a bit like driving by looking out of your rearview mirror.

Big Data changes this paradigm by allowing you to iteratively sift through data at extreme scale in the wild and draw insights closer to real time. This is a very good thing, and companies that do it well will beat those that don’t.

No. 2: Big is not just big volume. The term “Big Data” is a misnomer and it is causing some confusion. Several of us here at Forrester have been saying for a while that it is about the four “V’s" of data at extreme scale - volume, velocity, variety and variability. I was relieved when IBM came up with three of them; variability being the one they left out.

Some of the most interesting examples we discussed centered on the last 3 V’s – we heard from a researcher who is collecting data on vital signs from prenatal babies and correlating changes in heart rates with early signs of infection. According to her, they collect 90 million data points per patient per day! What do you do with that stream of information? How do you use it to save lives? It is a Big Data Problem.

I visited a client recently, a large company with global operations and a large application delivery organization. A senior VP in charge of a large part of that organization told me an interesting story about its experience with a change in the way it approaches EA over the past few years. In brief, he said:

• “A few years ago our architects were mostly dispersed into various parts of the delivery organization; we didn’t have an EA group.
• “Then we recognized that we needed an EA group to better manage our use of technology, so we pulled those people out of delivery and formed them into an EA group.
• “Since then EA has spent a lot of time understanding our business, building capability maps, and focusing on a more strategic level.
• “But now I’m hearing cries of anguish from the delivery teams that they don’t have enough direct engagement and support from the architects in their delivery efforts. The delivery teams are concerned that EA has moved too far away from the actual delivery of business value, that EAs are not helping enough, and that it’s harming the effectiveness of the delivery organization.”