On 22 August 2002, Ben Ponne and Paul Ramsay decided to establish a professional organisation for Enterprise Architects. Ben believed that the new profession of "Enterprise Architects" should be about designing and building successful companies, beyond the scope of Information Technology where the new profession originated. His vision was to bring together business professionals to further shape this new profession.

To support this vision, Ben established a strong team to work on the design of a new not-for-profit organisation and on 5 March 2003, the "Global Enterprise Architecture Organisation Ltd" was incorporated in Wellington (New Zealand) (Registration number: WN/1280965).

Throughout 2003, the members of the original team kept working on building the organisation: KPMG-Legal (Graham Tubb & Ken Yeoman), Deloitte (Mike Taitoko), PWC-Investment Banking (Mike Redman), EDS (Manhor Singh, Damian Woodhouse, Vijay Seetharaman), Bredemeyer Consulting (Dana Bredemeyer), Equinox (Paul Ramsay), and Essence Networks (Nitish Verma). Startup capital was raised and accounting practices were put in place. The first members joined the organisation and basic membership services were implemented throughout the year.

Members representing more than twenty different countries joined GEAO. We launched our GEAO membership newsletter and our financials were outsourced to an independent accountancy firm to free up valuable capacity for further growth. During 2004 GEAO was still run by volunteers.

In 2005 we launched the GEAO Enterprise Architecture Journal in cooperation with Otago University. We also launched the development of a new certification programme for Enterprise Architects as members asked for a high-end, experience based, professional distinction.

Throughout 2006, there was increased pressure on the volunteers to keep up with the growth of the organisation. This proved to be very challenging and we realised that this started to impact the services to our members. We decided to invest in a new highly collaborative membership platform to be able to better serve our members. In December 2006 we launched this new platform and outsourced support and maintenance. 2006 was also a year in which we started to intensify the contribution to and sponsorship of international conferences through GEAO tailored workshops and speeches.