Forrester Research, in its latest report, has defined seven strategic platforms as a foundation for Digital Business Architecture (DBA) of an enterprise, endorsing that these platforms essentially help connect today's implementations to tomorrow's requirements.

The report outlines these seven platforms on the basis of business goals for each technology domain, and is specifically brought out as a unified guide for future planning for Enterprise Architecture professionals. The seven platforms that help better connect are:
•       SOA platform
•       Information Fabric
•       Interaction platform
•       Information Workplace
•       Unified Communications platform
•       Business Service Management platform
•       Business Design platform

Stating the rationale for conceptualising these seven platforms, Randy Heffner, Forrester’s VP says, “As a planning model, these platforms provide a foundation for seeing relationships between diverse technology initiatives and building toward a deeply capable and flexible technology platform. The idea is not to drive detailed planning and build out as a huge, extended architecture effort but rather to have a strategic model to facilitate incremental planning and evolution of enterprise IT infrastructure.”

Heffner and other key analysts structured major business technology trends within the emerging framework of Forrester's Digital Business Architecture (DBA) for the report. Giving a brief context of the DBA, he elaborates, “It is a framework for planning an incremental evolution toward the future, enabling business technology solutions to deliver more business value today and to keep on delivering more (value) as business and technology evolve.”

The report also lists six sub-platforms of the DBA, viz. - Event Management, Business Process Management, Business Rules, Analytics, Configuration Management, and Security.