Using Intentional Actor Modeling to Support the Evolution of Enterprise Software Architectures in Organizations

The development and evolution of enterprise-wide software architectures is influenced by multiple stakeholders and decision makers in development organizations. Architectural design and evolution is embedded in a larger distributed network of organizational participants, who actively contribute to the identification, interpretation, delegation, reasoning, and enacting of decision processes. In this paper we argue that to adequately support architectural design and evolution in development organizations, it is necessary to deal with the inherently distributed and interrelated nature of organizational decision making in development organizations. This paper proposes treating architectural design and evolution as a distributed and interconnected decision process among organizational actors. The utility of the proposed approach is explored through a pilot study at an insurance company during an enterprise SOA evolution effort.