About Forrester
Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology.

Alex serves CIO Professionals. His coverage includes business technology strategies, business sustainability, business-driven governance frameworks, process-oriented organizational design, change management, and continuous improvement. He is also a leading expert on best practices for making technology organizations more effective and business relevant through the implementation of service-oriented structures and process frameworks.
Alex helps clients partner with business peers to drive growth and customer engagement; develop business technology people and processes for future success; and adopt business process management (BPM), Lean, and Six Sigma to deliver business outcomes.
Prior to taking on his current role, Alex focused his research on Business Process Professionals' challenges, such as the development of business process architectures, portfolio management capabilities, centers of excellence, and deployment of change management programs. Before joining Forrester in 2005, Alex developed the IT consolidation program and managed the data center of a large European automotive company. Previously, he spent 10 years at IBM and EDS as an executive senior consultant and led several international customer projects in areas such as mergers and acquisitions, IT shared services, sourcing, organizational change, process, and technology management. Alex also worked for five years as a research scientist in the area of high-performance computing at the IBM Scientific Center Heidelberg, publishing in refereed journals and co-editing three proceeding books.
Alex received a master's degree in engineering from the Civil Engineering Institute in Bucharest, Romania, and a Ph.D. in engineering from the Technical University Aachen, Germany. He received a postdoctoral fellowship from Princeton University.

Although Many Buy An ESB First, More Buy SOA Management In The Long Run
As I discuss with clients the developing notions of Forrester's Business Capability Architecture (see blog post #1 and blog post #2), I have found it important to distinguish between different...
Strategic Plan: The EA Method Playbook
This report describes the strategic plan of Forrester's EA method playbook — our set of high-value practices that enterprise architects should use to help their organizations plan, architect,...
If your organization is like nearly every other one I've talked to in the past 20+ years, you have a spaghetti chart of integration connections between all the siloed applications that run your...
Design patterns, proven technology stacks, and well-documented application infrastructure are fundamental tools for promoting common practices in the design of business solutions. Enterprises create...
Vision: The EA Method Playbook
In the midst of continuing economic, political, competitive, and technological disruption over the next decade, your enterprise architecture (EA) practice will flounder unless it gains clear vision...

While we've seen many examples of mergers and acquisitions, what is the expert opinion on opportunities when an organization separates into separate entities, in the context of architecture? Are...
Step back and think: How would you answer the question, “What does your IT group deliver to your business?” Your answer will indicate how you think about the relationship between business...
Strategic Plan: The Contact Centers For Customer Service Playbook
As more enterprises develop organizational and operational structures to better manage customer experience, they need to drive this down into contact center architectural design. Today's challenge is...

Can you please send some key requirements, skills, areas of focus, and areas of demonstrated expertise for an SOA architect?
Create A Cohesive Business From Your (Seemingly Random) Collection Of Applications And Data
Integration is a perennial challenge for application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals. Vintage, monolithic applications are hard to deal with, and point solutions abound, including point...

Here's a flash of the blindingly obvious: More and more products are going digital. You know this, but what I'm interested in is how they are going digital and to what degree....
A conceptual architecture is a tool that enterprise architects can use to enhance communication, provide context, and aid direction setting. Though there are many situations in which an architect...
I'll soon have a client report out with interesting Forrester data about how SOA adoption continued apace during the Great Recession. In the meantime, Forrester partnered with TechTarget on a...
An Empowered Report: A Customer Service Example Of Responsive Architecture
Forrester's recent book, Empowered, describes the type of technology-based innovation by frontline employees that can cause nightmares for enterprise architects. However, rather than attempting to...
In discussions on cloud computing, I often talk to architects who have been told to create a "cloud strategy." This sounds appropriate enough, but there’s a devil in the details: When the...
Can you remember a year when your business both (1) grew in a healthy way and (2) changed more slowly than the year before? Besides a company’s early startup years, such would be the exception,...