In September-October Forrester conducted its State of Enterprise Architecture (EA) survey – a broad look at EA in the context of the IT & business organisation. They asked respondents questions ranging from where does the architecture function report, to the state of completeness of various architecture domains, the key technologies firms will be making significant architecture decisions about, and the degree of support for EA by various constituencies ranging from application developers to corporate business management.
From their survey two statistics really stood out:
They asked survey respondents – who were primarily architects in large enterprises – to identify the drivers for the EA program.
The interesting thing about this is that the top drivers are predominately strategic and business-focused ones: enable better planning, improve business agility, enable better Business-IT alignment. The more technical and tactical ones were generally lower in priority.
But it is also clear that EA teams are struggling with how to act on these drivers. When asked about themes for the EA program for 2010, the results grouped around greater involvement with projects and project governance. And when we asked about the state of completeness of various architecture viewpoints, it’s clear that EA has made the most progress on the more technical and less business-focused architectures:
Some interesting information to ponder on here, the original source of this is from Forester, and can be found here.