Conscious Decisions

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An interesting interplay of Constraints and Decisions occur when an Enterprise Architect navigates through the Business, Data, Application and Technology architecture domains. 

Picture this:
  • While there is plenty of options, business wants to bet on a certain horse for competitive advantage. A Decision and an initial Constraint are created. This is a decision articulated by a Business Architect. (the suffix is optional. it could be your business head making this decision). E.g., Go Public cloud for B2B processes
  • The Business Architecture (BA) decision acts as a 'constraint' for the data architect who then makes business Data decisions within this boundary without compromising architectural viewpoints. E.g., Public and Transaction data goes on the public cloud; Private and Sensitive data in a Private cloud.
  • Likewise, an Application Architect (AA) ensures alignment to constraints above and makes decisions among the business application options without compromising on application road-map. 
  • Where there is an exemption required they raise an Architectural Exemption that goes up the value chain as feedback.
  • The decisions made by the AA acts as a constraint to the Technology Architect (TA) in the choice they then make hence articulate their Technology Decisions.
I've been fortunate to have worked with a few UK enterprises that have perfected this process and are able to stay focused, efficient and yet agile. The phrase I heard often is 'conscious decision'.

Conscious Decision is a practical container for well articulated and properly aligned architectural decisions. 

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