Decision Tool
Connect architecture tradeoffs to business capability, risk, value, operating consequences, and future adaptability.
Executive Summary
Connect architecture tradeoffs to business capability, risk, value, operating consequences, and future adaptability.
Executive outcome: A transparent, evidence-based architecture decision with accountable ownership and visible business and operating consequences.
Executive audience: Executives, transformation leaders, enterprise architects, and platform owners
Business Problem
Architecture choices are often evaluated through technical preference or immediate delivery pressure without making their business capability, operating complexity, risk, economic, and reversibility consequences explicit.
Core Model
No single score replaces evidence or judgment. The dimensions make cross-functional conditions visible before a solution is selected.
Contribution to the defined outcome and capability.
Fit with enterprise direction, priorities, and target operating model.
Time and dependencies required before meaningful capability is available.
Effect on customer effort, consistency, trust, and value.
New work, support burden, exceptions, skills, and coordination introduced.
Control, legal, regulatory, resilience, and policy implications.
Ownership, quality, privacy, lineage, access, and lifecycle consequences.
Coupling, interfaces, context flow, reliability, and dependency implications.
Ability to support credible growth, volume, geography, and use-case variation.
Ease of understanding, operating, testing, changing, and supporting the solution.
Investment, run cost, change cost, opportunity cost, and avoided cost.
Ability and cost to change direction as evidence or conditions change.
The accountable owner, decision rights, consultation, and review trigger.
Diagnostic Questions
Business Friction
Architecture can remove Business Friction by making context and capability easier to move through the enterprise—or create it through coupling, complexity, unclear ownership, and irreversible choices.
Application
Document context, business outcome, constraints, owner, deadline, and viable options.
Agree weights before scoring so the preferred option does not determine the method.
Rate every option, record evidence and assumptions, and identify uncertainty.
Review operating, risk, data, integration, economic, and reversibility implications.
Approve one option, document dissent and conditions, then define measures and a review trigger.
Executive Outputs
Measures of Success
Failure Patterns
Executive Decision
Which viable option best supports the required business capability within acceptable risk, complexity, economics, and reversibility?
Related Frameworks
Downloadable Tool
A combined ADR and thirteen-criterion scorecard for comparing options and preserving accountable decision rationale.