Charles Betz

For more than two decades, enterprise architecture (EA) has swung in and out of favor — embraced during periods of consolidation and sidelined during waves of decentralization, cloud adoption, and agile delivery. Predictions of EA’s demise recur continuously. But the data increasingly contradicts that narrative. Across four consecutive years of Forrester survey research, enterprise architecture […]

A Conversation With Murray Cantor (Part Two) In part one, Murray Cantor reframed technical debt as economic liability and argued that uncertainty is not an annoyance to be minimized but the core feature of IT investment. Once you accept that premise, a deeper question emerges: How should organizations reason — and decide — under uncertainty? […]

We’ve Been Building The Foundation For 40 Years A year ago, I wrote about the graphic future of IT management — IT management platforms converging on graph architectures to create a digital twin of the IT organization. The governance question I raised: Who owns this graph? Nine months later (December 2025), Foundation Capital declared that […]

I didn’t wake up last Saturday morning planning to rethink my OpenClaw infrastructure and cost model. Then I got an email from Anthropic. It was short, polite, and to the point: Third‑party harnesses like OpenClaw would no longer be covered under my Claude Max subscription. Continued use would incur additional charges. Capacity constraints. Core products […]

Forrester’s Technology Strategy Impact Award, Enterprise Architecture Award, and Data & AI Impact Award recognize organizations that set the standard for excellence in using IT, AI, and data to drive meaningful business outcomes. Learn how to apply for these prestigious honors.

A Conversation With Murray Cantor (Part One)   Enterprise IT runs on billions of dollars of implicit risk, yet most organizations still manage it with deterministic spreadsheets and gut‑feel prioritization. Murray Cantor — PhD mathematician, defense systems architect, and veteran of IBM’s most successful high‑risk projects — thinks there’s a better way. Over three conversations […]

Enterprise architecture has always existed to absorb complexity. But generative AI is testing that mandate in ways we haven’t seen before. Every day brings a flood of new models, tools, agents, claims, and counterclaims. Architects are expected to understand foundation models and retrieval architectures, advise on pilots, arbitrate platform decisions, and weigh emerging risks — […]

From time to time, Forrester publishes what we call accelerate content: material intended not to explain why something matters but to help organizations actually do it. Our newly updated enterprise architecture (EA) policy falls squarely into this category. We usually don’t blog about this kind of material. Policies are not aspirational. They are not trend‑driven. […]

The Architecture Pendulum Is Stopping Every few years, a familiar argument resurfaces: Is enterprise architecture (EA) finally fading away? This question isn’t new. Over the past two decades, EA has repeatedly swung between prominence and rejection — embraced during periods of consolidation, then sidelined as organizations chased speed through agile delivery, product-centric models, and decentralized […]

The cloud era, application modernization, and “AI-first” principles are making existing portfolio models obsolete. Learn how Forrester’s new REAP framework can help IT leaders manage today’s tech portfolios.

To deploy AI safely and profitably at scale, CIOs must cut through AI hype and focus on IT capability maturity. Learn how in this preview of a new report.

The AI agent infrastructure market is exploding — LangChain just raised $125 million; hyperscalers and SaaS vendors are spinning up agent frameworks and control towers; MCP and A2A protocols are converging as standards; and observability vendors are racing to add LLM tracing.

Enterprise architecture (EA) is having a moment. After years of being dismissed as slow, rigid, or misaligned with agile ways of working, EA is now at the center of one of the fastest‑growing, most strategic software markets. Our latest research confirms that the EA management suite market has surpassed $1 billion and its momentum is transforming […]

For those of us of a certain generation, “Black Friday” invokes memories of the Cabbage Patch Kid riots of 1983.

AI may be grabbing front-page headlines — but tech debt is lurking below the surface. Learn about the path forward to manage it.

At Forrester, we’re deprecating the term configuration management database in our research. Instead you’ll increasingly see it termed “IT management graph.” Find out why.

Congratulations to Takeda Pharmaceuticals, winner of this year’s Enterprise Architecture Award for North America. Learn more about Takeda’s winning strategy as well as the strategies of our two finalists.

Learn how JFrog’s announcements at its recent SwampUp user conference differed from those of its competitors by having an emphasis on application trust, supply chain integrity, and agentic development releases.

Technical debt isn’t just a developer headache anymore — it’s a strategic business risk. Learn how technology lifecycle management can be a practical lever to pull to stop technical debt from overwhelming your organization.