The Forrester Enterprise Architecture Awards has been the only global awards program dedicated to recognizing excellence in enterprise architecture since 2010. We continue our partnership with The Open Group to co-judge the EA Awards this year and are delighted to announce that the EA Awards program for 2024 is in full swing.

Enterprise architecture (EA) has evolved from a group plagued by ivory-tower thinking to a pragmatic discipline that drives business outcomes with measurable value. Effective EA begins with six priorities: It must be valuable to the business; accountable for the outcomes it promises to deliver; influential in order to have an impact while empowering team autonomy; collaborative to build trust and partnership; agile to keep pace with change; and innovative to steer toward the future.

We congratulate Contact Energy, this year’s winner, and finalists Bank of Singapore and FWD Group. They all demonstrate how excellent EA practices contribute to the high performance of their business and drive both internal and external value.

Winner: Contact Energy

Contact Energy, a New Zealand electricity generator and retailer providing energy, broadband, and mobile services, embarked on a new transformation and growth journey to drive the decarbonization of New Zealand for a renewable energy future. In the past few years, Contact has succeeded in transforming its retail, corporate, and generation businesses. A superior EA foundation, a strategic pillar of its technology strategy, has been a key enabler for Contact to achieve its enterprise transformation objectives and deliver business outcomes.

As part of Contact’s digital transformation, EA plays a crucial role in:

  • Managing risks through seamless business collaboration. Contact worked closely with the business to address key risks. Representative initiatives include identifying and treating the latest and most significant cybersecurity risks, the upgrade of risk and management of change solutions, the amendment of information and data policy to include AI, proactive management of IT asset lifecycle information, an information and knowledge management program, and a digital solution architecture aligned to EA principles.
  • Driving cost reduction through migration, optimization, and modernization. Contact’s EA approach also focused on maximizing technology efficiency, highlighting the substantial benefits of cloud migration. Through the SAP cloud optimization program, the company cut infrastructure costs by over $1.3 million using several targeted methods. Additionally, automating system test execution, replacing outdated platforms with modern iPaaS solutions, and consolidating systems are expected to drive further cost reductions in the near future.
  • Improving customer and employee experiences through architecture principles. Contact prioritizes usability and interoperability as core architecture principles. The move to a new risk management platform and subsequent launch of a health and safety management mobile app empowered users to submit observations directly from their phones, resulting in a 50% increase in submissions within the first year. Additionally, the ERP upgrade enabled mobile access to applications from any location, while enhancements to core networks and infrastructure ensured seamless connectivity across all generation sites.
  • Increasing revenue through EA co-design. Contact identified several opportunities, or pain points, and created initiative briefs to address them. For example, transforming from spreadsheets and manual processes to a modern automated platform for its trading business led to a revenue increase of $221,000 in Q4 FY’24, and the adoption of digital engineering improved data and documentation for operationalization and decision-making.

Finalist: Bank of Singapore

Bank of Singapore (BOS) is a wholly owned private banking arm of OCBC, the longest-established Singapore bank and the second-largest financial services group in Southeast Asia by assets, and it offers wealth management services to wealthy individuals, families, and financial intermediaries worldwide. The EA practice of BOS is the cornerstone of its digital transformation journey, driving significant business outcomes across multiple dimensions and aligning closely with its business and tech leaders to meet challenges. BOS scored the highest in the AI bonus category.

BOS’s EA practice focuses on the following practices:

  • Contributing to revenue growth through architecture transformation. EA adopted API-first open architecture and created new revenue streams through partnerships with financial intermediaries, contributing to an overall increase in nontraditional revenue. It also led transformation of the Group Wealth Platform. In addition, its enterprise data architecture drives decision-making, improving investment performance by a significant amount, and the implementation of a modular, composable digital-core architecture leveraging group platforms for agile product development and governance reduced time to market for new products.
  • Driving cost savings through rationalization and modernization. The EA practice consolidated its application portfolio after a systematic review, resulting in annual cost savings. It also guided BOS’s hybrid multicloud strategy, which enabled improved application scalability and performance, as well as promoted technological innovation. The reusable microservices and APIs also reduced development time and costs for new projects.
  • Managing risks through comprehensive EA-led frameworks. The EA team not only implemented a robust enterprise architecture framework governed tightly by its Architecture Review Committee, but it also developed a “compliance by design” approach, integrating Zero Trust into architectural blueprints. In addition, EA established a comprehensive vendor assessment framework to reduce its exposure to third-party risks and a “build vs. buy” framework to make informed decisions about technology solutions with careful evaluation of specific needs, resources, and goals.
  • Enhancing CX and employee satisfaction through architected tech adoption. The EA team architected an omnichannel platform with improved customer experience (CX) in the bank’s Digital Services and Relationship Manager front-end application. In addition, the EA team designed and launched an internal OCBC GPT (generative AI) chatbot that improved productivity by up to 50% for daily tasks, a first for a local bank in Singapore.

Finalist: FWD Group

FWD Group (FWD) is a Pan-Asian life and health insurance business with more than 12 million customers across 10 markets. FWD not only adopted a customer-led strategy designed to champion customer needs and create a desirable customer journey but also built a standardized digital architecture across the group, powered by cloud-based data analytics and technology. FWD’s Group EA team is a crucial component across all technological and digital operations, acting as the pivotal link between business objectives and technological execution. In this year’s EA Awards, FWD scored the highest in the IT4IT bonus category.

FWD’s high-performance EA practices include:

  • Modernizing architectures with categorization to improve business outcomes. FWD’s Group EA not only categorizes each project and evaluates the required effort, criticality, and support to ensure successful execution, but it also embraces reusable and modern architecture patterns, such as APIs, microservices, and serverless, achieving high level of reusability in system deployment across all markets. This approach has led to cost savings of potentially millions and increased automation in software delivery, accelerating the development process significantly and ensuring consistent and high service availability.
  • Establishing effective ARB operations to ensure business strategy alignment. The Group EA team of FWD takes the lead in establishing an architectural review board (ARB) as a vital part of the corporate governance framework. The ARB operates under a guideline designed to maintain efficient and effective enterprise architecture operations, increasing visibility and providing a decision-making funnel for all technology-related projects to ensure business alignment and compliance with standards and regulations.
  • Enabling rapid technology deployment to drive cost-effectiveness. FWD’s Group EA team established a verification mechanism to ensure uniformity of EA standards across all teams and foster the integration of ideas for similar initiatives. It advises on modifications to embrace a future fit enterprise architecture and encourages the reuse of existing architectural patterns. This approach enables the rapid and cost-effective deployment of technological advancements.
  • Leveraging architectural design to increase customer satisfaction. FWD’s Group EA team has put forward a robust three-tiered architecture proposal, comprising an experience layer, a process layer, and a system layer. This architecture is engineered to deliver a consistent and unified experience across all channel touchpoints. As of 2023, customer feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with a 91% purchase journey rating as “great” or “good” and an 88% service rating by customers in the same high categories.

The announcement of our APAC finalists concludes Forrester’s EA Awards for this year. But you can learn more about their winning secrets by attending Forrester’s Technology & Innovation Summit APAC, taking place in Sydney and digitally, October 29, 2024.

And we look forward to your stories on how your EA team is impacting your business performance. Be sure to submit your entry for next year’s EA Awards in early 2025!