6 Conclusions and limitations

In this paper, we aimed to find an answer to the following question: “Which principles are essential to design a compliant decision management solution?” To accomplish this goal, we conducted a study combining a three round focus group and three round Delphi Study. Both were applied to retrieve compliance principles from participants, 44 in total, employed by five governmental institutions. Our rounds of data collection and analysis resulted in 11 relevant compliance principles which should be taken into account when designing a decision management solution. From a research perspective, our study provides a fundament for design principles focused on compliance, which can be applied to create or implement a decision management solution. An important step as the identified principles can now be applied in practice, and their impact can be measured and further evaluated upon. From a practical perspective, our study provides organizations and (enterprise) architects within organizations with a set of principles that can be applied to guide the design of decision management solutions. It offers a framework that can structure thinking about the solution that needs to be implemented, taking into account the compliance perspective.

Several limitations may affect our results. The first limitation concerns the sampling and sample size. The sample group of participants is solely drawn from government institutions in the Netherlands. While we believe that government institutions are representative for organizations implementing decision management, further generalization towards non-governmental organizations, amongst others, is recommended. Taken the sample size of 44 participants into account, this number needs to be increased in future research. Moreover, a possible limitation in our research setup (focus groups and Delphi study) was the difference in minimum years of experience with regards to decision management. This may have led to the participants of the Delphi study not formulating additional compliance principles, they only supplemented the existing compliance principles. This research focused on identifying new constructs and establishing relationships given the current maturity of the decision management research field. Although the research approach chosen for this research type is appropriate, research focusing on further generalization should apply different research methods, such as quantitative research methods, which also allow us to incorporate larger sample sizes to validate our findings. Lastly, future research could focus on the effects of the implemented principles.