Gene Leganza | Vice President, Forrester Research

Gene leads Forrester’s government research group, researching best practices in the use of business technology in federal, provincial/state and local governments. Prior to this role, Gene covered IT management issues and was Forrester’s lead analyst for enterprise architecture programs in both the public and private sectors.

Gene has 25 years of IT experience, including application development, system programming, performance management and capacity planning, product strategy, IT management, and enterprise architecture planning. Gene came to Forrester through its acquisition of Giga Information Group. Prior to joining Giga, he was director of capacity planning and infrastructure architecture at John Hancock Financial Services in Boston. Previously, he held senior IT positions at First Data Corporation and Fidelity Investments, as well as development and marketing management positions at BGS Systems (now BMC Software) and Bachman Information Systems (now Sterling Software).

Gene has published papers on various topics and has spoken at local and national Computer Measurement Group, DB2 Users’ Group, and Sybase Users’ Group conferences. He earned a B.A. in psychology and music from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn.

For decades it has been common wisdom in capacity planning and performance management circles that IT needs to be business-driven, that is, that IT’s resources, initiatives and metrics should align with business strategy. In the past, that was much easier said than done given business units’ typical aversion to detailed planning. Over the last five years, economic doldrums drove most organizations to implement formal planning, prioritization, and governance processes, and organizations have significantly matured their planning processes. Meanwhile, service oriented architecture (SOA) has become hot, and effective SOA implementations require a detailed understanding of end-to-end business processes. Business units are coming to rely on IT architects’ sophistication regarding formal analysis processes to take advantage of SOA-enabled technology. The net effect is a trend away from waterfall planning towards an increasing collaboration between business and IT stakeholders.

In addition, the flexibility provided by service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables the continuous optimization of business processes. But the traditional IT organization, which is oriented toward discrete business units and supported by vertically integrated applications, constrains this optimization rather than helps. To be effective, the IT organization must develop an orientation around end-to-end business processes. A number of existing IT roles need to be redefined to ensure that this process orientation is reflected in IT's strategies and plans.

Finally, the economic slowdown also produced a new emphasis on clearly quantified business value for any resource expenditure. IT will be held responsible for establishing the value of SOA and for analyzing tradeoffs in development, future enhancement and integration activity, runtime performance impact, or other areas that can affect the business value of IT investments.