The practice of enterprise architecture (EA) is about your business — guiding decisions and designing solutions for better, more sustainable business outcomes. 

Pretty much every EA leader would agree with this statement — but only a small percentage can say that this describes their program. Whether due to the situation they are in or their own leanings, their impact is mostly on IT outcomes. It’s in this context that we are proud to announce the winners of the 2013 InfoWorld/Forrester Enterprise Architecture Awards. 

Each year Forrester Research and InfoWorld, in collaboration with the Penn State University Center for Enterprise Architecture, present the Enterprise Architecture Awards to recognize companies whose practice of enterprise architecture has delivered substantial business benefit. This year, the five EA initiatives honored were particularly broad in scope, with several winners sporting household names, including Cisco, MasterCard, and Verizon. The National Bank of Abu Dhabi and Yum Brands were also award winners, both with global operations that benefited greatly from adept EA implementation.

Two words stood out in all the winning submissions: “business” and “transformation.” These EA programs all share a singular focus on being central to how their business, not just their IT function, evolves. The 2013 Enterprise Architecture Award winners offer important lessons about the power of creatively integrating enterprise technology and business strategies. You can learn more about their stories in this blog post from Forrester’s Alex Cullen.

The Enterprise Architecture Awards were judged by a panel of experts with real-world EA experience. We offer our sincere thanks to our 2013 judges: Trekker Armstrong, director of architecture and planning at TransCanada; Munjal Dave, senior business architect at State Farm; Con Kenny, senior research fellow at National Defense University; Eric Meredith, vice president of architecture, governance, and communication at PNC Financial; David Parrott, head of enterprise architecture at Thomson Reuters Global Resources; and David Prior, head of architecture at GlaxoSmithKline.