Capturing decision making strategies in enterprise architecture - A viewpoint

Abstract

Enterprise Architecture modeling languages describe an enterprise holistically, showing its business products and services and how these are realized by IT infrastructure and applications. However, these modeling languages lack the capability to capture the design rationale for decisions that lead to specific architectural designs. In our previous work we presented the EA Anamnesis approach for capturing architectural decision details. In this paper, we extend the EA Anamnesis approach with a viewpoint that captures and rationalizes decision making strategies in enterprise architecture. Such a viewpoint is useful because it helps enterprise architects reconstruct the decision making process leading up to a decision and understand how and under which circumstances this decision was made. For example, under time pressure an architect may rely on heuristics instead of examining the decision problem in depth. More specifically, we contribute: (1) a metamodel for capturing decision making strategies, which is grounded in established decision making literature, (2) an illustrative example showcasing the potential usefulness of capturing the decision making process. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.