The Forrester Enterprise Architecture Forum 2010 North America (San Diego) is about two weeks away, and the EAF 2010 EMEA (London) is about five weeks away.

We chose the theme of these forums, "Leveraging Architecture For Business Impact," after a lot of thought and research. Your stakeholders in business and IT get benefit from the architectures you define and how you integrate these architectures into their plans. You can think of it as a two-step process with two different challenges: First, develop the architecture that reflects your business' operating model, values, and strategies; second, integrate this architecture into business and IT leaders' thinking.

This theme has guided who we've invited as external speakers, what sessions we're planning, and even what our Platinum and Gold sponsors will be talking about in their sessions. Every Forrester analyst and speaker will be describing "the shift" — the changes in business and technology that are driving new needs — and "the opportunity" — what EA must do to help its firm thrive in the shifting landscape.

Our recent research also reflects this theme. I'd like to highlight a few of the ten reports we've published over the past month: In "The State Of Enterprise Architecture 2010: Organization, Priorities, And Support," Gene Leganza and I provide a snapshot of the results from Forrester's September 2009 Global Annual State Of Enterprise Architecture Online Survey and show some surprising trends around EA in larger enterprises. In "Topic Overview: Information Architecture," Gene organizes Forrester's significant body of research on this critical yet lagging architecture domain.

Jeff Scott builds out our resources for those EA teams developing business architecture with "The The Anatomy Of A Capability Map." Galen Schreck describes how firms should approach assessing the fit of their infrastructure architecture to their needs in "Assessing Your IT Infrastructure Architecture," and Henry Peyret examines free and low-cost options for EA tools in "Open Source Solutions For EA Tool Needs Are Progressing."

Some of the reports that we will publish soon include sample business capability maps for three industries, an examination of infrastructure-as-a-service for architects, and more reports on information architecture.

I hope I see many of you at the Forrester Enterprise Architecture Forum 2010!