Drum roll, please! After a few intense weeks of processing and judging submissions, we are now at an exciting moment! Announcing the seven semi-finalists among those companies nominated for the prestigious Forrester Enterprise Architecture Award 2022 for North America!

Without further ado, the semi-finalists are (in alphabetical order):

• Arch Insurance Group Inc.
• Blue Cross NC
• Intel
• SouthState Bank
• Target Corporation
• US Bank
• Verizon Global Technology Solutions

The judges — four distinguished Forrester technology analysts — have been impressed by the quality of the submissions. This year’s seven semi-finalists have developed enterprise architecture strategies that put the customer at the center of their technology organization’s operating model. Here are some of the characteristics that distinguished the semi-finalists:

• The business value of EA is clearly articulated. A key differentiator for these semi-finalists: they have the data to prove the business benefits of their EA strategy. These EA leaders think in customer terminology and assess architectural decisions based on customer and business benefits. They anticipate and quantify outcomes before making those architectural decisions. And by focusing on both customer and employee experience, they accelerate business growth and reduce costs. As a result, the semi-finalists reinvest significant portions of their IT budgets into building new customer-focused competencies that enable business growth.
• Adaptive, creative, and resilient drive modern EA. Semi-finalists also differentiate themselves in how they drive their EA strategy to enable a company to quickly reconfigure business structures and capabilities to meet future customer and employee needs with adaptivity, creativity, and resilience. Their modern EA practices include the delivery of value in functional increments done through the lens of distinct customer personas with strong alignment between business and technology teams.
• The EA ecosystem includes business and IT subject matter experts. For the semi-finalists, EA leaders collaborated with and optimized the use of the organization’s subject matter experts, adopted innovative EA practices and techniques, fully engaged with business and technology sponsors, and co-created EA artifacts that were easily understood by all stakeholders. And finally, these EAs enabled the execution of their organization’s customer-obsessed strategy.

What’s next? The 3 enterprise architecture Award finalists will be announced later in August. And we will announce the winner during Forrester’s Technology & Innovation North America event on September 29–30, both in person in Austin and virtually as a digital experience. Stay tuned!

If you’re in EMEA and APAC, you still have time to submit your nomination packets! EMEA companies can visit here, and APAC companies can visit here to review the complete award nomination criteria and submit an entry. The deadline to submit a nomination is July 15th for EMEA and July 31st for APAC.