Cognitive Attention: How Enterprise Architects Master the Pitfalls of Our Perception and the Noise of Our Intuition with Cognitive Techniques

Making strategic decisions in a company is difficult, but important. The quality of strategic architecture decisions significantly influences the success of digital transformation projects. In human decision-making processes, our perception and intuition play a crucial role. However, they are not always reliable. In this chapter, I show the psychological biases and unwanted variability of judgments (noise) that enterprise architects are subject to in their work and how these can be prevented. I present techniques from cognitive sciences that are intended to help properly involve people in strategic architecture decisions, and that open a space for dialogue for enterprise architects to include different perspectives and thereby counteract biases and unwanted variability. This prepares the ground for making good architecture decisions and makes it clear that these decisions must not only be supported by all participants, but actively promoted.