The Three Types of Architecture Decisions
Thursday, 11:00 AM EST
The Architecture Decision Record has become a staple of modern architecture practice, but most teams treat all decisions the same way — and pay for it later in rework, confusion, and decisions that quietly rot. This talk makes the case that architecturally significant decisions fall into at least three distinct categories — structural decisions that shape the system's fundamental form, cross-cutting decisions that enforce constraints across components, and local decisions that make sense only in narrow context — each requiring different levels of rigour, different audiences, and different lifecycle management. Grounded in the BTABoK's Decisions concept, which frames decision-making as a core architecture artefact rather than a byproduct of design, the session gives practitioners a practical classification model they can apply immediately.
You'll walk away knowing which decisions deserve a full ADR, which need something lighter, and which ones are silently doing the most damage when they go unrecorded.
About Paul Preiss
Paul Preiss is the CEO and Founder of the Iasa, one of the largest Enterprise and IT architect associations in the world. Through his time at Iasa, Paul has taken the association from a single user group in Austin Tx to an international organization with chapters in over 25 countries. Paul's vision is a unified architecture profession with effective education, credentials and ethics which fully supports corporate strategy and delivery. He is a tireless advocate for the field and speaks on topics ranging form architecture ethics to best the best setup and structure for architecture teams. Paul has spoken at hundreds of events as well as held conferences and training for architects all over the world. He is an expert software and enterprise architect in practice and continues to work with companies on optimizing their technology strategy.
Prior to developing Iasa, Paul was the chief architect for Dell Pan Asia where he helped to integrate the technology strategy across 14 countries. He also served as the chief architect for the Sears point of sale replacement in North America consisting of 2000 stores and thousands of suppliers as well as the chief architect for a digital asset management firm, Ancept.
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