Insights from a Study on Decision Making in Enterprise Architecture

Although there are many frameworks for Enterprise Architecture (EA), they focus mainly on the holistic structure of an enterprise and rarely take decision making into account. This is surprising, given the large role that (design) decision making seems to play in EA. A lack of empirical work offering insight into decision making in practice might be the cause of this. To address this knowledge gap we report on some first insights from an empirical study on how the practice of decision making in EA is perceived by professional enterprise architects. We sketch an outline of designing and decision making in contemporary EA, including a high level of politicization, emotional decision making, and subordination to business management. We discuss the implications of these findings for further research and work centered around EA.