TDWI The Data Warehousing Institute

It's becoming pretty clear that the ability to analyze data is becoming one of the most important technology-based capabilities an enterprise can have. There's a lot of hype around about big data, and it's actually well-founded hype --- if that's not a contradiction (perhaps I should call it well-founded fanfare). In any event, our world is changing as organizations gain the ability to process formerly unheard-of amounts of data with formerly unheard-of speed. New, improved information processing capabilities are significantly changing science, where scientists in labs look for patterns in data rather than dream up hypothoses and run tests to prove them right or wrong. And, in similar ways, it's changing how businesses make decisions. I've been looking for evidence that enterprises are moving on improving their information management capabilities since we started doing our "State of EA" surveys in 2009, and the 2012 data finally shows that developing or expanding information architecture is finally EA's #1 priority (well, OK, it's tied for first place with developing or expanding business architecture).

Information Architecture Is Finally A #1 EA Priority

It seems to be popular these days amongst industry pundits to recommend that organizations add a new Cxx role: the Chief Data Officer (CDO). The arguments in favor of this move are exactly what you'd think: the rapidly accelerating importance of information in the enterprise, and, as important, the heightened perception of the importance of information by business executives. The attention on information comes from all the rich new data that simply didn't exist before: sensor data from the Internet Of Things, social media, process data -- really just the enormous volume of data resulting from the digitization of everything. Add to all that: new technology to handle big data in a reasonable time frame, user-friendly mobile computing in the form of tablets, data virtualization software and data warehouse appliances that significantly accelerate the process of getting at the information for analysis, and the promise of predictive analytics, and there's plenty of cause for an information management rennaisance out there. With a little luck, the activity it catalyzes will also improve enterprises' ability to manage the data and content that's not so new but also very important that we've been struggling with for the last decade or so.

The only argument against creating this role that I've run across is that if CIOs and CTOs did their jobs right, we wouldn't need this new role. That's pretty feeble since we're not just talking about IT's history of relative ineffectiveness in managing information outside of application silos (and don't get me started about content management) -- we're adding to that a significant increase in the value of information and a significant increase in the amount of available information. And then there's the fact that the data could be in the cloud and not managed by IT, and there's also a changing picture regarding risk that suggests a new approach.

The use of road maps to illustrate technology plans is fairly widespread. Whether it's a vendor explaining its product plans or a technology architect showing the evolution of a particular area of the infrastructure, road maps are great for communicating what happens when. And when plans as illustrated by the road map get sign-off, they can become a useful tool in change management as well. Someone wants your key resources for a special project? Fine, but all the dates on that road map they just approved just shifted six months to the right. Road maps tell the story of what to expect an organization to accomplish for the foreseeable future, and that's what makes them powerful.

That's why road maps that link traditionally difficult-to-explain areas of technology, such as those related to information management, to specific and highly desirable business outcomes can be a major win for architects looking to communicate what they're doing and why. There's always been a Catch-22 about explaining the value of complex technologies to audiences with no appetite for technical complexity -- but with needed sign-off authority for key resources (like funding). If the EA team has credibility (OK, that can be a big "if"), just showing the interrelationships between business outcomes, business capabilities, IT projects, and required activities in the various EA domains can satisfy the need for "explaining" that complex technology. Or for explaining the need for that not-well-understood architecture process that requires business involvement, such as information architecture development or governance.

Here's a rough example. Other detailed views can supply supplemental information, but this summary view tells the story of how the business goals and strategies drive changes to how business capabilities are instantiated in the application/information/technology architectures.

Today's organizations must manage the explosive growth of all types of information while addressing greater-than-ever business demand for insights into customer needs and the business environment. Meanwhile, the significant regulatory and compliance risk associated with information security has increased the urgency for tightly controlled information management capabilities. These requirements are hard to meet, with scant best practices available to tame the complexity that firms encounter when trying to manage their information architecture. Enterprise architects must define the organizational capabilities they need to develop and evolve their information resources -- as well as the technology to exploit them. You can only achieve all this with a coherent information strategy that defines and prioritizes your needs and focuses resources on high-impact goals.

Crafting a detailed information strategy and successfully executing it is a tall order, one that has eluded most organizations. IT has been managing information ever since businesses embraced the use of computers -- so why are most organizations so ill-prepared to maximize the potential in their information assets? One word: volume. The sheer magnitude implied by the term "enterprise information" turns organizations away from the Sisyphean task of managing at the enterprisewide level and toward the much more controllable scope of information in silos. However, the siloed view is an operational view, and maximizing information's potential means looking across silos for relationships, strategic synergies, and insights. Unfortunately, few organizations are mature at harnessing subject matter expertise from the various business and IT areas and engaging in the collaboration necessary to establish the structure in information to make it available for analysis. But time's up! You need to establish a clear information strategy and formalize your information architecture practice because:

As the pace of change continues to accelerate in an increasingly complex business environment, organizations need to thoroughly understand how their business operates and plan the technology-fueled business transformation they'll need in the future. Establishing this understanding and enabling the transition to the future state have always been the concerns of enterprise architecture programs, and EA has emerged as a critical practice for managing an enterprise's evolution.

But EA programs have existed for more than a decade, and most of them have fallen short of these lofty goals. Why? Old-school EA has been too tactical, too technology-centric, or too disengaged from business priorities to have significant impact. Enterprises need a high-performance approach to EA that is laser-focused on driving business outcomes. To plan their future, organizations have the following alternatives:

If you're trying to build an effective EA program, you're in trouble from the get-go. I'd like to paint a rosier picture for anyone involved in this strategic, potentially very high-impact practice, but consider the fact that one of our more frequent client inquiries is about how to communicate EA's value to non-EAers. How can I not say you're in trouble if so many people doing EA look for outside help to explain to their own stakeholders that what they're doing on a daily basis is worthwhile? There's clearly something wrong with this picture.

So, OK, let's say you want to build an EA practice anyway, despite the poorly understood value proposition -- who should you staff it with? Misguided people with a desire to labor away in obscurity? Actually, no, you want your best and brightest. Those few very smart people who know your business very well, have both deep and broad knowledge and great analytical skills, and who display the potential for strategic-, system-, and design-thinking. That's a little challenging.

And then, when you find these people and attract them to your program, how best to organize them for effectiveness? Centralizing EA resources gives you the most control and makes it more likely that EA can deliver on its strategic value proposition. Decentralizing or federating EA resources puts the architects where the action is, making it more likely business and BT stakeholders will perceive value from the effort. But then those federated resources sometimes get so involved with their local -- and usually tactical -- issues that they go native and they're not really working on the "E" in EA anymore.

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?

Only a few weeks to go before Forrester's US EA Forum 2011 in San Francisco in February! I'll be presenting a number of sessions, including the opening kickoff, where I'll paint a picture of where I see EA going in the next decade. As Alex Cullen mentioned, I'll examine three distinct scenarios where EA rises in importance, EA crashes and burns, or EA becomes marginalized.

But the most fun I've had preparing for this year's event is putting together a new track: "Key Technology Trends That Will Change Your Business." In the past, we've focused this conference on the practice of EA and used our big IT Forum conference in the spring to talk about technology strategies, but this year I've had the opportunity to put together five sessions that drill down into the technology trends that we think will have significant impact in your environment, with a particular focus on impacting business outcomes. Herewith is a quick summary of the sessions in this track:

I'll start things off with a discussion of "The Top 15 Technology Trends That EAs Should Watch." This relates to my recent Forrester research on that topic, which is seeing a lot of hits on our website; I expect everyone in attendance will have seen it, so rather than bore everyone with a quick summary of all the trends, I'll talk about how a few very high-impact business scenarios will use combinations of technologies to really change how people work. I'll also take the pulse of the audience regarding which scenarios they see as particularly exciting for their enterprises.

I've taken some heat in comments at the ZDNET version of my post about the top 15 tech trends research piece. Apparently, to non-Forrester clients who don't have access to the research on the website (except for a rather steep by-the-drink price), the blog post comes off as a teaser with no payoff. Mea culpa. Here's the deal: My process, like that of many analysts these days, is to do research, publish it on our website, and then yak about it via social media. While I'm very careful in Twitter to point out when links will take you to something that's free versus something that's for Forrester clients, I wrote the blog post that found its way to ZDNET's site mostly with Forrester clients in mind. It mostly says "Hey, check out this research doc. Here's what I was thinking when I set out to publish it."

What happens next is that the various analysts who contributed to the trends doc will post blog entries about their areas of expertise, specifically about the topics we talked about in the trends doc. So, in a few weeks, there will be lots of info for non-Forrester clients to read to dig into what we're talking about in this trends piece.

But for now, the social media campaign is looking too much like we're withholding the bottom line just to squeeze some bucks out of the public. Not so. In the interest of addressing that issue, here is a table of the tech trends in that piece, sorted by highest impact (over the next 3 years).