Are you ready for Forrester's IT Forum 2011? Mark your calendars for May 25-27 in Las Vegas and June 8-10 in Barcelona — and help us design an event that is as relevant and productive for you as possible. We've come up with three potential draft themes and need your vote for the best IT Forum 2011 theme:

1. Unleash your empowered enterprise.

As technology becomes more accessible through mediums beyond IT's control, you have but one choice: Get proactive by empowering employees, or swim against the current. Successful BT leaders will react not by blocking access but by lending their expertise to increase the chances of technology success and empowering the users to solve customer and business problems. This year's IT Forum will provide a blueprint for reaping the benefits of your empowered organization — complete with case studies, methodologies, and step-by-step advice tailored to each IT role.

2. Capitalize on the intersection of business and technology.

IT leaders have long struggled to deliver business and technology alignment.  But alignment implies a waterfall process: decide on a business strategy, and then build your technology on that foundation. Today, our businesses move too fast for the traditional IT model. Instead, Business Technology leaders must join the leaders of their lines of business to create business and technology strategy simultaneously.  That means working with new business partners inside and outside your organization, operationalizing innovation through standards, and above all, saying, "yes, and..." instead of "yes, but..." This year, we'll dedicate IT Forum to building bridges to new business partners, scaling innovative solutions, and co-creating business and technology strategy.

Firms are often challenged to undertake transformation at a grand scale — to sustain and scale BPM programs across the organization. All firms are at subtly different levels of maturity, with different histories, unique cultures — and while there are many commonalities, every organization needs to approach the BPM and transformation agenda in subtly different ways.

Enterprisewide transformation involves a large number of people doing some pretty special things. The reality is that each organization will need its own subtle blend of skills, methods, techniques and tools. In a sense, the organization needs to weave its own proprietary method framework — to create its own fabric — a unique approach that reflects its special needs, the maturity of the different business units, the history of change, culture, and political challenges.

There will be people inside the organization that need to own that framework and set of methods, monitor its efficacy, and improve it over time. And while external resources can complement those employees, the executives at the helm should understand that they cannot abrogate responsibility for change. Too often, I hear the transformational objective stated and then followed by something like " . . . and we are looking for an outsource provider to do it all for us.” That sort of attitude is likely to end up in a courtroom (as things go sour down the line).
Coming back to the weave — populating that framework is always a challenge (since you only know what you know you know). What methods, techniques, and approaches does your organization need? For the organization to answer those questions effectively, it needs to understand the likely challenges it will encounter and assess the skills and capabilities required to overcome them.

As Forrester’s EA tools analyst specialist, I am regularly receiving inquiries from EA teams that are encountering trouble choosing the "single repository of truth" for the entire enterprise. Generally, they are oscillating between two products after a long decision process, hesitating in many cases because no one product is able to satisfy all the architects: the EAs, the solution architects, and sometimes the business architects. One product satisfies some architects and not the others, and vice versa; in the end, choosing one single product would not satisfy anyone because for each option that will satisfy a few, some will not use it (generally, for good reason), and it will not give others the information they require to do their job. Therefore, for these EA teams, the dream of getting a "single repository of truth" is becoming a nightmare. I encounter this sort of dilemma in half of the inquiries I receive about EA tools and particularly within the largest companies.

My answers are sometimes difficult for these EA teams to hear:

• First: Do all team members agree on EA objectives for the next two to three years? Do all architects know and share the same IT objectives and priorities? If EA and IT objectives/priorities are not clear, it is not surprising that they want different tools, because a universal EA tool does not really exist at this time. The recent document I published about the EA management suite as a third generation of EA tools explains how the most recent two generations complement each other.

Earlier this week, I sat in on a session at Oracle OpenWorld that highlighted the importance of scaling process governance as BPM initiatives expand throughout organizations. The session, titled “Rapid, Successful BPM Adoption,” laid out the key principles of process governance:

• Establish standards for implementing process improvement projects.
• Prioritize BPM projects so you work on the most achievable ones first.
• Clearly define the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved in the BPM project.
• Put someone in charge with authority to enforce process governance rules.
•  Establish a BPM center of excellence to ensure steps 1-4 are followed.