Strategic Position Papers: a governed home for the direction-setting document
A new EA-catalog artifact for scope, options and guardrails — moving through a real Framing → Positioning → Transitioning lifecycle.
Most architecture teams have some version of the same document: a few pages that lay out the problem, the realistic options, the tradeoffs, and the guardrails for a direction the organisation is about to commit to. It usually lives in a slide deck or a Word file, gets reviewed once, and then quietly goes stale the moment anyone acts on it. Strategic Position Papers give that document a real home in the catalog instead.
A lifecycle, not a static file
A position paper moves through Framing → Positioning → Transitioning → in review → published, the same governed-entity pattern the rest of the EA catalog already uses for sign-off. Framing captures scope and a capability-fit evaluation grid. Positioning holds a weighted options matrix — criteria, scores, and the resulting ranking — plus the guardrails a chosen direction needs to respect. Transitioning tracks the actual work packages that carry the decision forward, each of which can be promoted straight into the demand pipeline if your organisation runs Business Engagement too.
Published means published
Once a paper is approved, it’s read-only. If the direction needs to change, you don’t edit history — you supersede it with a new linked draft, the same way you’d expect a real governed document to work. Every review and approval along the way is recorded, so “who signed off on this and when” is never a question you have to go digging for.
It plugs into everything else
A position paper links to existing architecture decisions, shows up in the “Referenced By” panel on the entities it touches, and its work packages surface directly on the Capability, Application and Technology pages they concern — so “is there already agreed direction on this?” is answerable without opening every paper that might mention it.
Export to a styled PDF is built in, with a proper cover page, a scored options table, and a related-decisions section — the kind of document you can actually hand to a steering committee, not a markdown dump.