Decisions and the potential for agile services

I saw this post over on the Web Gambit today - How Agile is your Architecture? - where Karthik emphasizes the Agile Manifesto's Responding to change over following a plan. He is talking about architecture agility and says

"After a certain point, the software's architecture becomes rigid and inflexible, and only allows for minute changes to its supported feature set"

While his focus is on technology/platform change, it seems to me that enterprise decision management, with its focus on decisions and Decision Services, offers the opportunity to add a layer of very agile services to your architecture. Not only is this a recognition of the change over plan reality of most projects (it ensures that the core business logic of the application can be developed for both flexibility and rigor), it might also be considered an effective way to write maintainable code in an era in which retaining knowledgeable staff is increasingly difficult. One could consider this an approach to "lean" application development and maintenance too. Decision management and technology can drive agility into your architecture by delivering a layer that is easy to change as business needs change - a decision layer - especially a layer that can be deployed to multiple platforms (Java, .NET etc).

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