Enterprise architecture (EA) is critical for enabling organizations to operate at scale and over long time horizons. As the only global awards program dedicated to recognizing excellence in EA, the Forrester Enterprise Architecture Awards (EA Awards) has been attracting leading firms worldwide to submit descriptions of their EA programs and achievements for evaluation since 2010. This year, we continue our partnership with The Open Group to co-judge the EA Awards, and in my home region of APAC, it’s a privilege for me to review leading regional EA practices and learn from them, and I am honored to announce the winner and runners-up for 2025.

Forrester’s outcome-driven EA model emphasizes four primary benefits through a hands-on practice: revenue/mission outcome, customer experience/employee experience (CX/EX), cost efficiency, and risk reduction. And as most leading enterprises are pursuing another year of technological advancements, especially in AI, the EA Awards this year spotlight organizations that demonstrate how their EA frameworks have pushed the boundaries of technology and fueled innovation to drive business growth.

We congratulate the Hong Kong Jockey Club, this year’s winner, and runners-up AIA Group and Nan Shan Life Insurance Company. They all demonstrate how excellent EA practices helped align their IT strategies with business objectives, empowering them to accelerate business innovation and stay ahead of the curve.

Winner: Hong Kong Jockey Club

The Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC), a world-class sport organization that acts continuously for the betterment of society, embarked on a journey to modernize digital capabilities, strengthen governance, and enhance stakeholder experience. Through disciplined modeling, enhanced governance, executive stakeholder engagement, and visible digital successes, HKJC demonstrated that EA can deliver tangible value in mapping the IT capability to the business strategy and outcome.

Over the past 18 months, HKJC’s EA practice has been instrumental in advancing key elements of its business strategy to ensure sustainable growth, digital innovation, and operational excellence. HKJC:

  • Enabled the modernization of critical platforms for data-driven decisions. By developing an integrated digital EA repository, HKJC mapped over 500 systems, 400 business capabilities, and 700 technology artifacts; established standardized modeling views; and built over 29 dynamic dashboards. These outputs directly supported racing operations, customer-facing digital enhancements, and real-time decision-making capabilities. HKJC not only partnered with the business stakeholders to review the critical business activities and the business strategy but also defined it as an operating model and continues enriching its contents based on a purpose-driven approach.
  • Embraced a structured governance framework for business alignment. This framework allowed faster evaluation of digital investments, aligning technology roadmaps with its strategic priorities. As part of the framework, HKJC provides architectural guidance to a range of initiatives, such as mobile-first customer platforms, digital-led venue experiences, and predictive analytics for customer engagement. This ensures resilience, scalability, and alignment with customer centricity and enterprise goals.
  • Focused on architecture assets to enable resilient business growth. First, architecture models exposed redundancies in application portfolios and guided consolidation strategies, increasing operational efficiency while minimizing technical debt. Business capability mapping identified critical areas for digital enablement, leading to more informed project prioritization and resource allocation. Second, the standardized and correlated architecture repository improved visibility into system dependencies, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, third-party supplier risk, and disaster recovery requirements, enhancing HKJC’s resilience posture.
  • Created a structured yet flexible environment to encourage innovation. This environment is the key enabler to ensure that experimentation, emerging technology adoption, and iterative learning are supported within strategic guardrails. HKJC took a modular approach in its design of the EA repository and metamodels, allowing agile teams and business innovators to perform quick impact assessment and model new capabilities, products, and services rapidly without disrupting core enterprise architectures. HKJC also took a lightweight governance approach for innovation initiatives and new technology product evaluation. It enables innovation velocity while preserving architectural coherence.

Runner-Up: AIA Group

AIA Group (AIA) is the largest independent publicly listed pan-Asian life insurer. It operates in 18 markets with over 25,000 employees, offering a wide range of products including individual protection and saving, employee benefits, and credit life and pension services to corporate clients. AIA’s EA team has been dedicated to building a series of Technology, Digital, and Analytics (TDA) program. The extraordinary business outcome of TDA 1.0 since 2021 paved the way to AIA’s winning of Forrester’s EA Award in 2022.

In 2024, AIA defined a TDA 2.0 architecture to transform itself into the most customer-obsessed, intelligent, innovative, and efficient insurer powered by technology. The EA practice of AIA in TDA 2.0 is:

  • Focusing on four workstreams to drive quantifiable business outcomes. These workstreams span future-proofed technology, distribution intelligence, customer digital experience, and health technology and data. Each workstream covers a range of initiatives that generate measurable business results. For example, the hyperscale architecture in the future-proofed technology workstream optimized IT spend with FinOps, achieving reduction in unit costs. And the AI-enabled middle-office architecture across the buy, service, and claims journeys in the customer digital experience workstream contributes to exceptional levels of customer satisfaction, dramatically improving operational efficiency in servicing, underwriting, and claims processing.
  • Driving innovation with architecture governance to accelerate value. AIA formed an AI Council to lead responsible generative AI adoption and coordinate planning, tech choices, and cross-market synergies. To ensure governance of architecture and program delivery, AIA built a Data Council to define enterprisewide data governance and resolve data issues. It also publishes blueprints and reference models to drive consistency, reuse, and faster value delivery. And by working closely with local teams, AIA’s Cloud Center of Excellence provides cloud-native patterns, automation tools, and security frameworks, strengthening governance and security posture while maintaining agility.
  • Leading platform engineering to enable long-term business growth. AIA received the top score in the bonus category of platform engineering as part of this year’s EA Awards. Cloud-native strategy and infrastructure modernization delivered significant cloud and network savings. AI-powered software engineering based on its proprietary genAI engineering platform achieved up to 55% reduction in coding and review time, accelerating delivery and improving quality. And its AIA Knowledge Assistant Platform powers business users to create and manage genAI assistants, enabling natural language querying of internal documents for better accuracy and flexibility.

Runner-Up: Nan Shan Life Insurance Co., Ltd.

Nan Shan Life Insurance Co., Ltd., (Nan Shan) is one of the most long-established insurance companies in Taiwan. It provides high-quality protection and insurance planning services to more than 6 million policyholders through its extensive service network. Taiwan’s insurance market is highly saturated, with 21 competing insurers. In 2024, despite continued volatility in the financial markets, Nan Shan demonstrated resilience through its stable and professional operational capabilities, as well as its competitive advantages in product offerings and service value transformation.

Nan Shan established the Beyond Lab, taking the lead to build Nan Shan’s dotSHAN EA Framework through a business-driven approach. Nan Shan’s EA practices:

  • Unlock business value through process mining and influence strategies. On one hand, through close collaboration with key stakeholders to audit its core processes, Nan Shan presented 14 strategic value propositions for digital development, and the business capability maturity metrics derived from them effectively formed consensus on innovation and collaboration projects. On the other hand, Nan Shan initiated a Dandelion Program. It aims to disseminate architectural competencies across all business units by providing EA training to all employees within five years. This program made a significant impact by addressing long-standing operational challenges through targeted process optimization efforts.
  • Govern innovation through digital strategy frameworks. To integrate AI-driven services, Nan Shan established the Digital Development Strategy Committee and a digital and business collaboration meeting mechanism. It not only developed a digital strategy framework grounded in 14 strategic value proposition metrics but also requires business units and project managers to align their innovation proposals with the framework. For over 100 proposals received annually, mostly on data analytics and AI, Nan Shan applied rigorous evaluation through cross-functional collaboration meetings, reducing the rate of disinvestment from 36% to under 10%.
  • Drive genAI business outcomes with a holistic architecture approach. Nan Shan received the top score in the bonus category of generative AI as part of this year’s EA Awards. It focuses on genAI-powered hyperautomation initiatives rooted in business process excellence driven by its dotSHAN EA Framework methodology. In its EA project TalkTalk, a platform designed for internal stakeholders with humanlike conversational experiences, Nan Shan established a comprehensive architecture development process across strategy, motivation, business, application, technical, and project architectures. As a result, TalkTalk autonomously resolved 96% of inquiries, achieved an average customer satisfaction score of 4.9 out of 5, and generated over 1,000 monthly engagements for new cross-selling opportunities.

Learn More At Technology & Innovation Summit

Want to learn more about these successful EA teams? Join us at Forrester’s Technology & Innovation Summit APAC, taking place in Sydney and digitally on August 19, 2025, where we’ll celebrate the winning strategies of these three organizations and share what you can learn from them. We look forward to hearing your stories on how your EA team is impacting business performance. Learn how to submit your entry in next year’s EA Awards in early 2026!