Gene Leganza

VP, Research Director Serving Enterprise Architecture Professionals

Read Gene's blog posts

Gene leads a team of analysts that provides research and advisory services that address the needs of Customer Insights and Enterprise Architecture professionals. His team focuses on data management and governance strategies and technologies, as well as building and optimizing the insights-driven enterprise.

Previously, Gene was a senior analyst on the Enterprise Architecture team, focusing on information strategy and architecture with a particular concentration on the insights-driven cultures and their impact on business processes, organizational structures, and technology strategy. He continues to help clients address their information strategy needs and navigate the data management technology and services landscape.

Previous Work Experience

Gene has more than 30 years of IT experience, including enterprise architecture planning, infrastructure architecture, IT management, performance management, capacity planning, product strategy, and application development. Gene came to Forrester through its acquisition of Giga Information Group. Prior to joining Giga, he was director of infrastructure architecture and capacity planning at John Hancock Financial Services in Boston. Previously, he held senior IT positions at First Data Corporation and Fidelity Investments and development and marketing management positions at leading software firms.

He has published dozens of papers on various topics and has spoken at a variety of conferences in the US and abroad.

Education

Gene earned a B.A. in psychology and music from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

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Gene Leganza

VP, Research Director Serving Enterprise Architecture Professionals

Read Gene's blog posts

Previous Work Experience

He has published dozens of papers on various topics and has spoken at a variety of conferences in the US and abroad.

Education

Gene earned a B.A. in psychology and music from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

Research Coverage

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Gene Leganza's Research

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For Enterprise Architecture Professionals

REPORT: Eliminate Confusion In Data Management Roles And Responsibilities

Organization: The Data Management Playbook

January 9, 2019 Gene Leganza

As enterprise architecture (EA) leaders prioritize data capabilities, they're looking broadly at how data management (DM) resources are spread across the organization. Where can they consolidate their scattered resources? What's the right resource model to meet the business demand for improved access to data and insights? This report provides a framework to understand how DM capabilities map to your organizational resources. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy. We've updated it to include our most recent research data on DM organizations.
For CIO Professionals

REPORT: Build An Insights-Driven Business

The Executive Overview Of The Insights-Driven Business Playbook

January 12, 2018 Srividya Sridharan, Gene Leganza

In today's hypercompetitive business environment, harnessing and applying data and analytics at every opportunity to differentiate your products and customer experiences is fast becoming a prerequisite for success. But setting up the technology foundation, restructuring teams, evolving processes, and transforming cultural norms to become an insights-driven business isn't easy. This report for executives leading data, analytics, and insights initiatives provides an overview of Forrester's framework for how to complete this journey successfully: the insights-driven business playbook.
For Enterprise Architecture Professionals

REPORT: Map Your Way To Your Information Strategy's Business Outcomes

December 29, 2016 Gene Leganza

One of the most difficult aspects of an information architecture (IA) practice is engaging stakeholders to buy into your strategy and contribute to your architecture development. This report explains how to design a road map for your information strategy that will clearly show the impact on business outcomes while laying out the interdependent people-, process-, and technology-related activities needed to make it all happen. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and revises it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy. We are now updating it to include our latest thinking on information strategy.
For Enterprise Architecture Professionals

REPORT: Create KPIs That Show The Effectiveness Of Your Information Strategy

December 16, 2016 Gene Leganza

How effective is your information strategy? You can't answer that question without comprehensive assessment and key performance indicators (KPIs) that specifically target your information capabilities. This report integrates with Forrester's framework for a capability-based performance management program to track the success of an information strategy. The approach creates metrics linked to business outcomes in enterprise architecture professionals' strategies. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and revises it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.
For Enterprise Architecture Professionals

REPORT: Align Your Information-Related Roles And Processes With Your Business Goals

December 15, 2016 Gene Leganza

Amid the noise and clamor surrounding big data, and as self-service for business information (BI) and analytics becomes a reality, a major change is happening behind the scenes. Schema-on-read-based data exploration is key to removing the expertise bottleneck that has plagued data warehouses (DWs) and centralized BI efforts since DWs began. These tech-driven changes also mean profound disruption to roles like information architect and data manager. This report helps guide enterprise architects through these changes and prepare for a data-driven future. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.

For Enterprise Architecture Professionals

REPORT: The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch: 2011 To 2013

An Empowered Report: High-Impact Technologies That You Should Track

October 14, 2010 Gene Leganza

Forrester began summarizing technology trends last year to help enterprise architects create their organizations' technology watch lists. For this year's list of top trends, we've used the same criteria — impact, newness, and complexity — but we've modified the categories, merged related topics, added five new trends, and updated all the entries with this year's perspective. This year's categories? "Empowered" technologies, process-centric data and intelligence, agile and fit-to-purpose applications, and smart technology management. Also new this year are the results from a survey we ran as input to this report that asked respondents to rate more than 40 technologies for impact to their organization in the next three years.
For Enterprise Architecture Professionals

REPORT: Topic Overview: Information Architecture

January 13, 2010 Gene Leganza

Information architecture (IA) is a cornerstone of enterprise architecture (EA), but 43% of the architects we surveyed either have not yet addressed this domain or have only begun to implement what they need. And for the vast majority of the established IA programs, the most substantial portion of the value they expect to deliver is still in the future. IA has been EA's problem child, but demands for high-quality real-time information and advances in information management software that provide significant new business capabilities — but entail "garbage in, garbage out" scenarios — mean architects can't afford to delay its implementation any longer.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: Forrester's Data Management Reference Architecture

Align Data Management Roles To Create Stronger Business Value

February 2, 2011 Noel Yuhanna, Gene Leganza, Rob Karel, Boris Evelson, James G. Kobielus, Leslie Owens

The continuing explosion in data volume, increasing numbers of business users, growing data complexity, compliance requirements, need to support global operations, and growing need for real-time access are motivating enterprises to get more control of data management strategy and data architecture. More importantly, more and more businesses use insight derived from data as a key corporate asset for competitive differentiation. Enterprises need effective data management architecture to support their changing business requirements and ensure that they always use trusted and secure data for key processes. But myriad choices and new data requirements inundate data architects, enterprise architects, database administrators, and data quality specialists. Forrester's data management reference architecture provides a framework, including architectural patterns and building blocks, to guide these data management stakeholders in managing strategy and architecture.
For Enterprise Architecture Professionals

REPORT: Enterprise Architecture? What's In It For Me?

To Communicate EA's Value, Architects Must Relate It To Stakeholders' Goals

December 21, 2007 Gene Leganza

Enterprise architects know that their EA programs provide significant value to their organizations. But communicating EA's value is challenging: As a strategic activity, it doesn't have the immediate impact of other IT activities, such as implementing new business capabilities through application projects, implementing new infrastructure, or fixing problems. In addition, architecture activities and deliverables can appear abstract and academic to executives constantly looking for bottom-line impact. Successful EA leaders overcome these difficulties only with well-planned and vigorously pursued marketing programs specifically designed to "sell" the value of EA to a variety of stakeholders. The key? Don't sell architecture, sell business capabilities.
For Enterprise Architecture Professionals

REPORT: Topic Overview: Enterprise Architecture

August 13, 2007 Gene Leganza

As business technology (BT) becomes integral to organizations' focus on growth, innovation, and flexibility, IT organizations are turning to enterprise architecture (EA) to best advance objectives ranging from operational efficiency to delivering BT-enabled business innovation. This overview looks at what EA can do for your organization, how to create an effective architecture program, and how to implement your core architecture strategies, and it also provides a brief view of related topics.