Gordon Barnett

Human-centric principles are becoming increasingly important to organizations in today’s fast-paced and ever-changing business environment. But tech executives are lagging their peers in adopting human-centric practices. Learn the five SOLID principles of human centricity that can help propel IT organizations to sustainable success with technology.

The myths of operating model design are the misconceptions that can hinder progress and lead to failure when attempting to transform your IT organization. Understanding these myths and avoiding the associated pitfalls is critical to ensuring that you can design an effective and robust operating model that delivers long-term value.

Changing business landscapes have prompted IT organizations to explore creative and innovative ways of structuring their business and operating models. Five key organizational concepts have emerged as particularly promising approaches: fractal organization, distributed autonomous organization, ecosystem organization, boundaryless organization, and adaptive organization.

To help you reach a future fit IT organization, Forrester has identified the six key steps to understanding IT operating model customers and stakeholders — if you do this, you can put them at the center of design, build, deliver, and serve.

The pandemic taught technology leaders the value of being adaptive. Learn five key design principles to make your IT operating models more adaptive.

Learn how the three finalists for Forrester’s Enterprise Architecture Award for North America drive their EA strategy and its impacts.

Forrester's annual State of Enterprise Architecture Survey can give you an inside look at the current state of enterprise architecture.

Over the past 24 months, Forrester has received a significant number of inquiries from clients requesting assistance in their organization design initiatives. There has been a range of more basic questions along with some more nuanced queries: “What are others doing?” “What is the best organization design process?” “What digital capabilities should I be investing […]

Principal analyst Gordon Barnett reviews the key questions CIOs should ask when designing an IT operating model structure that supports automation and customer obsession.

Ask any CEO or business executive about their biggest challenges, and you will see people/talent management rising to the top of the list. This is no different for CIOs, as there is a shortage of tech talent. This has led to a whole series of employee experience and engagement research to help executives attract, retain, […]

Many firms have used Forrester’s principles of customer obsession to guide their business and IT transformation journey, striving to be customer-led, insights-driven, fast, and connected. But in their pursuit, most firms fall short when it comes to organizational change. Rather than undertake a full organizational design exercise, firms are adopting tactical change, creating agile delivery […]

Les membres d'une entreprise jouent un rôle essentiel dans toutes les étapes de la transformation IT. Découvrez pourquoi.

A firm’s people play essential roles in all stages of IT transformation. For companies at the beginner level of maturity, employees must come together to connect the organization. Once the organization is united, it must adopt customer-centric principles to become adaptable and reach intermediate maturity. To reach an advanced maturity level, the organization must again […]

CIOs must adopt an adaptive operating model — being agile will not be enough to succeed in the future. The IT organization’s capabilities, structures, governance, and leadership must support the firm’s capacity to reconfigure underlying business concepts, including dramatically rethinking its core mission, its primary value proposition, its core competencies, the markets or industries in […]

Today’s enterprise architecture (EA) practices are relevant because they enable a firm’s customer-led and digital transformations. As more traditional EA use cases become commoditized, vendors that provide strong use cases that are vital to transformations will emerge as the leaders. These transformation-enabling use cases include strategic performance management, technology asset performance, operational insights, and people […]

Forrester defines enterprise architecture management suites (EAMSes) as: A foundation for capturing, managing, and reporting on a firm’s strategic and operational assets, defining the relationships between those assets, and assessing the effectiveness and efficiencies of those assets with the purpose of providing insights that may influence or guide the strategic direction of the firm. Our […]

Leading design-minded firms understand that design is the link between creativity and innovation. However, the road to becoming a design-minded firm is not easy. The biggest barrier to success is a lack of ownership of design management. If the business executives are reluctant to own design, then CIOs are best placed to lead and refocus […]

The demand for exceptional digital and customer experiences is exposing the constraints of existing technology organization practices. The people, processes, governance structures, and technology of the technology organization must change to drive and enable business success. CIOs need help, and enterprise architects (EAs) are best placed to influence and guide these digital transformations (see my […]

In their quest to become digital insurers, insurance carriers have a revolutionary opportunity to improve their businesses with new and emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. It is certainly a balancing act to find that perfect peanut butter-and-jelly combination of operational efficiency and customer engagement, however I believe many insurance carriers to be up to the […]