Enterprise architecture decision records bring transparency and progressive value to your enterprise architecture initiatives. Discover how you can use a decision repository to create alignment between IT and the rest of the business.
Enterprise architecture decision records (ADR) log the choices you make in building your IT landscape over time. By tracking your decisions in this way, you can maintain rationality and transparency within your application toolset.
Keeping records of your previous IT landscapes and the reasons they were changed, thereby ensures that your architecture is always moving forward. Equally, all the reasoning for your current state is available to anyone in your organization.
By showing clear records of why your architecture is the way it is and how it got there, you can share understanding of it with your stakeholders. Rather than silent frustration over pain points in your IT landscape, your users can see why choices were made and have a rational discussion with you if they disagree.
This serves to involve everyone in your organization in your enterprise architecture work, democratizing the practice and ensuring your technology is supporting your operations. SAP LeanIX maps and tracks your enterprise architecture to create transparency and synergy among your IT operations.
Let's explore why ADR are so important and how SAP LeanIX can enable EA record keeping. We'll then take a peek into the future at how we're expanding these capabilities.
ADR are key for driving alignment between IT and the rest of the business. To find out how SAP LeanIX enables record-keeping for enterprise architecture decisions, book a demo.
What Are Architecture Decision Records (ADR)?
Enterprise architecture decision records (ADR) are lightweight documents that mark decision points in the history of your IT landscape. Whenever you decide between options regarding the development of your business' technology toolset, you should create an ADR that notes what the options were and why you made the choice that you did.
This creates an audit trail for why your organization uses the software it does and why its architecture is set up the way it is. This serves to provide clarity on your software architecture, and transparency on your enterprise architecture decision making.
Let's say your organization began as a small start-up and went with flexible micro-services like Dropbox and Google Drive. As such, it made sense to use Slack as a communication tool, particularly since many of your partners and suppliers use it.
As your business scaled up, it made more sense to invest in Microsoft 365, which included the Teams communication service. Gradually, you migrated from Dropbox to SharePoint and Google Drive to Office 365.
Your organization continued to use Slack out of habit, until a new CTO joined the company and questioned why you aren't leveraging Teams in synergy with the rest of your Microsoft toolset. Without comprehensive ADR, you might not be able to answer that question.
An ADR, on the other hand, might have clear notes that you need to maintain Slack in order to communicate with third-party companies who do not use Teams. This will allow you to immediately recommend reducing your Slack licenses or switching to a system-agnostic video call tool.
Put simply, ADRs take the guesswork and research out of enterprise architecture decisions, because you don't need to answer questions that have already been asked in the past. You simply need to consult your ADRs to find all the information that you need.
What Do Architecture Decision Records Look Like?
There are many enterprise architecture decision record (ADR) templates available, and each organization should customize the information they retain to their needs. However, a good starting point is an article titled Architecture Decisions: Demystifying Architecture, by Jeff Tyree and Art Akerman from Capital One Financial.
The article recommends your ADR contain 14 simple fields:
- Issue: the problem that prompted you to make a decision
- Decision: the choice you have made to resolve the issue
- Status: pending, decided, or approved
- Group: how you've chosen to categorize the decision
- Assumptions: the criteria you have used to make the decision (e.g. cost)
- Constraints: any restrictions on your IT landscape that your choice may impose
- Positions: all the alternative solutions to the issue that you considered
- Argument: the reason you chose the option you did over the others
- Implications: the likely outcomes of your decision
- Related decisions: connect your decision to any other ADRs
- Related requirements: the business goals that your decision supports
- Related artifacts: the artifacts that will be impacted by your decision
- Related principles: guiding principles that you used to make the decision
- Notes: any other relevant information
Key here are the connections to other decisions and the aspects of your IT landscape that are impacted by it. With these in place, all your decisions will begin to form a framework for making future decisions according to your business strategy.
The Benefits Of Architecture Decision Records
Enterprise architecture decision records (ADR) provide a rationale and a strategy to your enterprise architecture decision-making. Each decision serves to build on the past towards your vision for your IT landscape.
Without comprehensive records of your architecture decision-making process, you face making every decision in isolation. That means you need to research and explore your IT landscape, consider your options, then make an off-the-cuff decision every time you change your landscape in any way.
With a log of all your ADRs for all your applications, however, you can see the entire history of that application's development at a glance, gain deep understanding on why it is in your landscape and what tools and functions it supports, and see what alternatives have been considered and rejected in the past. Consulting ADRs from across your landscape, you can put each application in the context of the entire history of your organization's infrastructure, empowering your decisions.
ADRs will include notes on previous discoveries about your architecture, as well as any potential risks or pitfalls involved in making changes to an application. This also serves to enhance continuity in your decision-making between different individuals and even between teams that have changed extensively over time.
Overall, this serves to align all your enterprise architecture decisions into a progressive development towards optimization, rather than a variety of disparate decisions serving differing priorities. Yet, this isn't just a benefit for your enterprise architecture function, it also serves to create alignment between the differing parts of your organization.
Leveraging ADR For Business Synergy
Architecture decision records (ADR) aren't just for enterprise architects. By making your ADRs public within your organization, anyone can see the rationale behind any technology decision.
If one of your stakeholders is frustrated that they don't have access to the latest, bleeding-edge tool, they can simply look up the ADRs for their current application and see why you have chosen not to replace it, complete with all the considered alternatives and analysis. If they dispute the decision, your stakeholder can submit a business case to have the decision reviewed.
From your stakeholders feeling powerless and seeing enterprise architecture as a blocker to their work, they will now be engaged with your enterprise architecture decisions and putting forward their opinions and evidence. In fact, a user's day-to-day experience with a platform is exceptionally valuable data for determining functional and technical fit.
Not to mention, your leaders will be able to look up the reasoning behind the layout of your IT landscape themselves in order to inform their strategic decision-making. They can immediately determine if, for example, cloud migration is feasible for part of your IT landscape with a few clicks.
This reduces the workload of enterprise architects and allows them to focus on optimizing their IT landscapes, rather than constantly reporting back to stakeholders. Meanwhile, stakeholders will find the experience of working with enterprise architects far more efficient and productive.
Yet, many organizations attempt to do this with email chains or Excel spreadsheets, and this simply isn't sufficient. To properly track ADRs, you need a solution specifically designed to support them.
Architecture Decision Records Within SAP LeanIX
Enterprise architecture decision records (ADR) empower your EA decision-making with enhanced data, increased transparency, and greater synergy with the rest of your business. To support this, however, you need to store your ADR in a dedicated repository that can provide read-only access to anyone in your organization to support enterprise architecture democratization.
SAP LeanIX streamlines governance by supporting Architecture Review Boards (ARBs) in documenting, reviewing, and managing architecture decisions. It ensures transparent decision documentation and facilitates collaboration, leading to faster, more-aligned decisions across teams.
Additionally, it captures architecturally significant decisions over time, supporting strategic scenario planning and alignment between strategy and execution. That's why we're working to expand these capabilities in order to support you in leveraging ADRs.
Enterprise architecture decision records (ADR) are key for gaining the greatest value from your enterprise architecture initiatives. To find out more about how SAP LeanIX plans to enhance your capabilities to work with ADR, book a demo:
