Fundamentals of Enterprise Architecture

Chapter 14. Framework for Architecture Decision Making

Effective architecture decisions are the heart and center of everything that enterprise architecture does. After all, what is a strategy or an architecture if not the culmination of several architecture decisions?

It is one thing for one team to make good architecture decisions. It is entirely another thing to accomplish this feat at scale—every team, across every organizational unit, making high-quality, consistent architecture decisions. Check out industry guidance from AWS and GCP for more perspectives on why architecture decision records are so important for an enterprise.

To help solve the scaling challenge, this chapter covers a framework that equips decision making with clarity and transparency.

Let’s start with the prerequisites required to apply this framework effectively.

Building a Foundation for Architecture Decision Making

Architecture decision making is a process. A very important process, but nonetheless, a process. A process’s efficiency depends on the tools that support it, the sequence and content of process steps, and the people executing it.

Thus, first let’s take a look at the primary tool needed to support the framework for architecture decision making: the architecture decision registry.

Providing an Architecture Decision Registry

While making the best choice under the circumstances is front and center in architecture decision making, architecture decisions also provide a historical record of the rationale ...