In today’s business environment, the pressure to change, and change quickly and often, is growing, thanks to the proliferation of empowered customers, emerging global markets, regulation (and deregulation), and growing social responsibilities. For the past several years, I’ve worked with CIOs from all types of industries as they’ve worked to transform the culture, the tactics, and the technology of their organization to become more agile. The successful ones, like Michael Mathias at Aetna or Glenn Schneider at Discover Financial Services, now sit in organizations where the business leaders look to IT as a key enabler of business agility.

And interestingly, when you speak with these successful CIOs, they often point to their enterprise architecture (and business architecture) as the secret weapon for how they achieve that agility — the ability to tap new technologies and processes to help their businesses shift and innovate quickly. That’s great news, and shows the potential for high-performance EA practices.

But the reality is that many EA programs continue to struggle, particularly when it comes to business engagement. Getting to that level of agility and business engagement requires you to infuse enterprise architecture into your business. And that requires a more advanced set of methods, techniques, and overall EA maturity, which is the focus of our Enterprise Architecture Forum 2012, May 3 to 4 in Las Vegas, and our Enterprise Architecture Forum EMEA 2012, June 19 to 20 in Paris. From the joint main-stage keynotes with our CIO Forum attendees to in-depth EA working sessions, all of the event content is designed to help you overcome the barriers of historical perceptions, process gaps, and cultural barriers that EA programs often face, and evolve your EA organization into one that is truly infused into your business. We look forward to having you join the conversation!