Enterprise architecture is a strange, somewhat amorphous domain. Like all new fields, it is made up largely of people who set out in life to do something else. I understand what this is like. I started life as a mathematician and then a philosopher and accidentally wandered into computing and somehow never emerged. In fields like computing in the early days and EA now, people have to take a fuzzy domain and make something out of it.

Enterprise architecture (EA) can be traced back to 1987 and has continually evolved ever since. In this Executive Report, we look at the state of EA today, including the frameworks that have evolved in the last few years, the challenge of business-IT alignment, business process management (BPM) and master data management (MDM), and technologies such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud computing. We also examine the governance and maturity of an EA program and conclude with new trends and challenges for the next decade and beyond.

This is the fourth in a series of Executive Updates in which I analyze the results of a recent Cutter Consortium survey on the subject of open source Java frameworks (OSJFs). Here in Part IV, I discuss the survey's findings for GUI, the Web, Web services, and persistence. The remaining three topics -- middleware, development/testing, and comprehensive -- will be covered in the next Update, the last part of this series, in which I shall also take a quick look at some non-Java frameworks for the sake of comparison.

In this hour-long webinar, Cutter Senior Consultant Mitchell Ummel, answers your questions about what semantically-aware applications might mean for your enterprise. A follow-on to his wildly popular Cutter IT Journal issue of the same title, this webinar will help you better understand the implications of applying semantic web technologies to business problem domains where traditional enterprise systems have fallen short, such as BI, data mining, and CRM.