Enterprise Architecture

Are Your Employees Doing This?

Brian Hopkins — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:15:45 +0000

I just saw something that makes a point I covered in a technology trends briefing for a client yesterday. After getting my Sun-dried Ethiopia Harrar (a $3.45 "clover-brewed," ridiculously priced guilty pleasure - nice marketing job, Starbucks!), I noticed a young woman sitting behind me with her 5x7 notebook out, busily scribbling while bent over a large smartphone. Hmmm, I thought, let's see what she's doing. So I made pest of myself by asking a few questions. Here is some of the Q&A (her replies are abbreviated; she was actually quite helpful and not as curt):

Q: Are you a student or is what you are doing for work? A: No, I'm actually working.
Q: So do you have a PC? A: I do, but it's a bulky 17" laptop that I got when I was a student, and I can do what I need on this.
Q: Is that company-issued phone, or is it yours? A: It's mine.
Q: Does your company help by paying for any of the service? A: No, I pay it all myself.
Q: Are you doing an official assignment? A: No, nobody told me to do this. I am ...
Q: Do you even have your PC with you? A: No, I didn't bring it.

Our data indicates that what I observed is becoming extremely common. For example, we find that half of employees pay for all of their smartphone services while using them to get work done. Furthermore, about two-thirds of the 20-something workforce choose their own productivity tools; 40% do so despite company policy that they only use company-issued technology tools for company work. That's perhaps expected, but have you considered that while 20-somethings are only about one-quarter of the workforce now, by 2020 they will be more than half?

And, OBTW…2020 is not that far off!

Empowered

2012 Predictions – Technology Will Shape Who We Are As People And Businesses

Brian Hopkins — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:43:30 +0000

In the first phase of the information age, technology helped us achieve new levels of productivity. In the next phase, technology will shape who we are. Why? Because technology is everywhere - and savvy businesses are paying attention. I did a check on a recent trip and noticed that, on average, 80% of the people around me were nose down in their technology. That's amazing if you stop and think about it….(pause for thinking)…When you spend that much time using something, it ceases to be a helper and starts to shape who you are.

I think 2012 will be a watershed year for the global business environment as technology moves from being "out there" to "part of us." In 2020, we will look back on 2012 not as the year the world ended but as the year it changed for good. Check out the TED video We Are All Cyborgs Now. Here are four predictions about business in 2012 that all start with the fusion of business and technology and the impact that it will have on shaping business. I hope will add some new thought food to your mental garden:

A Copernican Shift (And A Tip Of My Hat To Randy Heffner)

Brian Hopkins — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 23:02:44 +0000

As my first calendar year as an analyst draws to a close, I wanted to thank everybody who has read and commented on my blog and say that I look forward to even more next year. In closing out the year, I turn for a moment away from emerging technology to share an email I wrote to one of our clients in response to some questions he had about the changing nature of EA. In describing the future, I'm going to blatantly pirate a term that Randy Heffner has been using for a while because as I sought to answer this client's questions, I realized how absolutely spot on it is. here is the relevant text of that email:

-----------------

Happy to answer your questions as outlined below in the inquiry request. We have published a report along similar lines, BT 2020: IT's Future In The Empowered Era, that I recommend for additional ideas. Regarding timing, 2015 will be a stepping stone towards 2020, so I'll focus answers on 2020, and you can extrapolate to 2015 in terms of the migration that needs to occur.

My colleague Randy Heffner has been using the phrase "a Copernican shift" to describe what's happening to enterprise architecture - similar to when Copernicus' idea of the Earth actually moving in and around the heavens (instead of vice versa) finally took hold, people's view of themselves in the universe profoundly and dramatically changed, forever. It wasn't a swing of the pendulum, in other words. That's what's going on in the practice of EA - our view of the world is changing from techno-centric to business-centric. Along the same lines, savvy businesses are shifting their view of EA as a technology thing to EA for business.

How does this idea apply to your specific questions?

Business Architecture Is The Foundation For EA – Join Our BA Research Team

Alex Cullen — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:47:27 +0000

Awkward title, I know. But this blog is about two related points.

Forrester has long believed that business and technology have become inseparable. The Business Technology organization that embraces this reality is replacing the Information Technology organization that thought of itself as separate from business.

Enterprise architecture is also shifting -- from a technology and application-centered function ("IT architecture") where the business was simply a source of requirements to a business-focused, strategic, and pragmatic discipline broader than the team called EA. We see signs of this shift everywhere -- just look at the winners of the 2011 InfoWorld/Forrester Enterprise Architecture Awards.

As part of this shift, business architecture has become the foundation of enterprise architecture -- making possible strategy, planning, and change management of the fused business+technology reality of today's enterprises. Forrester's Enterprise Architecture research focus is to help our clients make this shift, providing them with best and next practices ranging from removing barriers between business and architecture, to creating frameworks and models that provide insight and drive decisions, to measuring and communicating benefits.

Which is where the second part of this post - and potentially you who are reading this - come in. We are expanding our business architecture research team to deepen depth, utility, and value to our clients.

If you:

The State Of Enterprise Architecture In 2011

Alex Cullen — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 12:04:22 +0000

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:

Rethink Your IT Strategy If You’re Serious About Cloud

Brian Hopkins — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:56:42 +0000

Cloud - people can't agree on exactly what it is, but everyone can agree that they want some piece of it. I have not talked to a single client who isn't doing something proactively to pursue cloud in some form or fashion. This cloud-obsession was really evident in our 2011 technology tweet jam as well, which is why this year's business technology and technology trends reports cover cloud extensively. Our research further supports this - for example, 29% of infrastructure and operations executives surveyed stated that building a private cloud was a critical priority for 2011, while 28% plan to use public offerings, and these numbers are rising every year.

So what should EAs think about cloud? My suggestion is that you think about how your current IT strategy supports taking advantage of what cloud is offering (and what it's not). Here are our cloud-related technology trends along with some food for thought:

Technology Is Everywhere — Are You Paying Attention?

Brian Hopkins — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 12:39:56 +0000

We are currently in a technology growth cycle, which is likely to continue for another five to seven years.* The opportunities presented by the likes of cloud, mobile, social, and big data are abundant. I'm wondering if EAs are overly focused on consolidation, simplification, and cost control, which could lead to missing the boat. Alternatively, companies may just leave EA behind as they sail to newer, profitable waters.

In Forrester's September 2011 Global State Of Enterprise Architecture Online Survey, we asked architects to prioritize the following challenges, and here is what we found:

While 37% of firms told us that improving how their firms identify and integrate new/disruptive technology was high priority, it was a substantially smaller percentage than the other nine challenges we asked about. Compare this to: 1) a similar CIO survey that ranked business technology innovation as the top priority, and 2) another EA survey question indicating that "using technology to increase business competitiveness" was the number three IT driver for EA programs.

My concern is that other things may be distracting EA attention away from the opportunities that abound in this growth cycle. Consider:

1. There is a linkage between innovation, new technology, and market disruption. While innovation does not require new technology, and new technology is not always disruptive, disruptive technology changes the value trajectory of products and services, leading to shifts in market leaders and losers. EAs must pay attention. A Forbes article on the most-innovative companies concludes that companies with a record of innovation command premium stock prices - the word is out, and businesses are demanding technology as a path to innovation. They won't wait on EA to get what they need.

The Whats Of Insurance Gets Some New Hows

Ellen Carney — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:19:02 +0000

One of the things that people like about the insurance industry is that the business of insurance doesn't change much. Insurance carriers have pretty much done the same thing: rate risk, issue policies, settle claims, sell through agents, and invest our premiums, all the stuff that makes them insurance companies. We've talked a lot about this idea of "business capabilities" here are Forrester, essentially the notion of what an industry does. These capabilities change very slowly, if at all. Capability changes are usually the result of some big structural economic change--think of the now-modern and booming Russian insurance industry growing after the collapse of the former Communist state. Of course, the way in which those capabilities get executed in a mature insurance market is influenced by what's going on outside the four walls of carrier and can change very quickly.

Let's Redefine The Term "Business Service" To Address Real Business And IT Needs

Henry Peyret — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 07:52:21 +0000

IT has too many separate portfolios to manage, and that hinders its ability to help business change. We have project portfolios, application portfolios, technology portfolios, and IT service portfolios - each managed in silos. These portfolios are all IT-centric - they generally mean nothing to business leaders. The business has products, customers, partners, and processes - and the connection between these business portfolios and the IT portfolios isn't readily apparent and usually not even documented. Change in the business - in any of these areas - is connected to IT only in the requirements document of a siloed project. Lots of requirement documents for lots of siloed projects leads to more complexity and less ability to support business change.

How do we connect these business concepts to IT? What's the "unit" that connects IT projects, apps, and technology with business processes and products?

It's not "business capabilities" - they are an abstraction most useful for prioritizing, analysis, and planning. We need a term to manage the day-to-day adaptation and implementation of these capabilities - the implementation with all its messiness such as fragmented processes and redundant apps - that we can use to manage any type of change.

We believe the best term for this unit is "business services," with this definition:

The output of a business capability with links to the implementation of people, processes, information, and technology necessary to provide that output.

business services

The Top Technology Trends For The Next Three Years (Part 2)

Brian Hopkins — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 01:00:55 +0000

As promised in my blog last week, here is part 2. In part 1, I introduced the two trends reports we did this year and showed the list of trends for business technology. These are trends and technologies to consider first with your "business hat" on. This blog post lists the other 10 trends to view first from a technology lens because they are of lower interest or impact to the business.

We have created four new categories to make IT stakeholder identification easier: 1) application platforms will be of high interest to your app dev and management teams; 2) integration will be of interest to app dev, data integration specialists, and even process folks (considering that processes can and should be integrated with apps and data); 3) infrastructure and operations; and 4) mobile computing, which spans infrastructure, app dev, and possibly line-of-business relationship managers who are very keen on mobility. And don't forget your security and compliance stakeholders, who will generally care about all of these!

Before listing the trends and technologies, I also want to introduce a new twist to our research this year - we have identified four major themes that run through many of our business technology and technology trends. These themes are so broad and far reaching that we thought it worth calling them out separately; we are advising our clients to understand these themes as the context for responding to individual trends:

The Top Technology Trends For The Next Three Years

Brian Hopkins — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 02:38:55 +0000

We just released our 2011 update to last year's EA top trends report, The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch: 2011 To 2013. In 2011, we have expanded our coverage by releasing two documents of 10 trends each:

The Top 10 Business Technology Trends EA Should Watch: 2012 To 2014. In this report, we identify 10 technology trends that you should first consider from a business viewpoint.
The Top 10 Technology Trends EA Should Watch: 2012 To 2014. These trends are better viewed from a technology-first perspective due to their IT-centricity, even though a business take on them is also important.

In addition to adding more trends, we made some other improvements as well, including: 1) updating the quadrants of the watchlist and providing a description of each; 2) providing details on how we scored the technologies in our watchlist; and 3) identifying four overarching themes that are influencing all the trends: empowerment, the app Internet, everything-as-a-service, and big data. More on these later!

For this first blog post on trends, I'm going to post the business technology trends.

The trends:

Next week I'll post on the second report and provide the technology trends and watchlist, so stay tuned.

I want to conclude with a thanks to all the analysts that helped with this report - it was a true collaborative effort, and it was great to work with our best and brightest as a new analyst. Here's who helped:

Big Data Will Help Shape Your Market’s Next Big Winners

Brian Hopkins — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:58:48 +0000

It seems that every week another vendor slaps "big data" into its marketing material - and it's going to get worse. Should you look beyond the vendor hype and pay attention? Absolutely yes! Why? Because big data has the potential to shape your market's next winners and losers.

At Forrester, we think clients must develop an intuitive understanding of big data by learning: 1) what is new about it; 2) what it is; and 3) how it will influence their market.

What is new about big data? We estimate that firms effectively utilize less than 5% of available data. Why so little? The rest is simply too expensive to deal with. Big data is new because it lets firms affordably dip into that other 95%. If two companies use data with the same effectiveness but one can handle 15% of available data and one is stuck at 5%, who do you think will win? The deal, however, is that big data is not like your traditional BI tools; it will require new processes and may totally redefine your approach to data governance.

big data

Announcing The Winners Of The 2011 InfoWorld/Forrester Enterprise Architecture Awards

Alex Cullen — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 17:20:41 +0000

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:

Join CIOs And CMOs As They Determine The Future Of Technology Planning In The Empowered Era

Gene Leganza — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:59:07 +0000

We at Forrester have written a lot about the "empowered era" in the past year. We're talking about the empowerment of customers and employees, the consumerization of technology, and grass-roots-based, tech-enabled innovation. There are lots of great case studies around illustrating these forces and how they can benefit the enterprise, but those success stories are only part of the picture. Behind the scenes, there is disruption and confusion about who's planning the road ahead regarding the technology in our organizations' future. It used to be that the CIO made sure that happened by making it the exclusive domain of strategic planners and enterprise architects. But isn't centralized -- and IT-based -- tech planning the opposite of empowerment? Wouldn't sticking with the old approach result in missing out on all this employee innovation that's supposed to be so powerful? Should the CIO no longer establish the technology the enterprise will use? Does the empowerment era mean the end of tech planning as we know it?

Big Data, Brewer, And A Couple Of Webinars

Brian Hopkins — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:58:30 +0000

Whenever I think about big data, I can't help but think of beer - I have Dr. Eric Brewer to thank for that. Let me explain.

I've been doing a lot of big data inquiries and advisory consulting recently. For the most part, folks are just trying to figure out what it is. As I said in a previous post, the name is a misnomer - it is not just about big volume. In my upcoming report for CIOs, Expand Your Digital Horizon With Big Data, Boris Evelson and I present a definition of big data:

Big data: techniques and technologies that make handling data at extreme scale economical.

You may be less than impressed with the overly simplistic definition, but there is more than meets the eye. In the figure, Boris and I illustrate the four V's of extreme scale:

The point of this graphic is that if you just have high volume or velocity, then big data may not be appropriate. As characteristics accumulate, however, big data becomes attractive by way of cost. The two main drivers are volume and velocity, while variety and variability shift the curve. In other words, extreme scale is more economical, and more economical means more people do it, leading to more solutions, etc.

So what does this have to do with beer? I've given my four V's spiel to lots of people, but a few aren't satisfied, so I've been resorting to the CAP Theorem, which Dr. Brewer presented at conference back in 2000. I'll let you read the link for the details, but the theorem (proven by MIT) goes something like this:

big data

Enterprise Architecture

Are Your Employees Doing This?

Categories:

2012 Predictions – Technology Will Shape Who We Are As People And Businesses

A Copernican Shift (And A Tip Of My Hat To Randy Heffner)

Business Architecture Is The Foundation For EA – Join Our BA Research Team

The State Of Enterprise Architecture In 2011

Rethink Your IT Strategy If You’re Serious About Cloud

Categories:

Technology Is Everywhere — Are You Paying Attention?

The Whats Of Insurance Gets Some New Hows

Let's Redefine The Term "Business Service" To Address Real Business And IT Needs

Categories:

The Top Technology Trends For The Next Three Years (Part 2)

Categories:

The Top Technology Trends For The Next Three Years

Categories:

Big Data Will Help Shape Your Market’s Next Big Winners

Categories:

Announcing The Winners Of The 2011 InfoWorld/Forrester Enterprise Architecture Awards

Join CIOs And CMOs As They Determine The Future Of Technology Planning In The Empowered Era

Categories:

Big Data, Brewer, And A Couple Of Webinars

Categories: