Take every change through review, with the decision on the record

What is an architecture review board?

An architecture review board (ARB) is the governance body that decides whether a proposed change to an organisation's technology and systems landscape is allowed to go ahead. TOGAF's Architecture Development Method treats this as the core of architecture governance: before a new system, a platform change, an integration or a significant redesign is built, it goes to the board as a change proposal, together with the impact analysis — what it touches, what it risks breaking, what compliance questions it raises, and how it fits the organisation's existing standards and target architecture.

The board is usually the chief architect or enterprise architecture lead, the senior technical owners of the domains affected, and representatives from security, risk and compliance. It reviews each proposal in a session, asks the questions a single team can't answer for itself, and reaches one of a small number of decisions: approve, approve with conditions, reject, or defer pending more evidence. That decision is recorded, becomes part of the architecture's decision record, and from then on is the standard other teams are measured against.

An architecture review board exists because the alternative — every team choosing its own technology, integration pattern and design on its own — is how organisations end up with several systems doing the same job, integrations that contradict each other, and nobody able to explain why a critical system was built the way it was. The board is the one place a change is checked against the bigger picture before it ships, not after.

What this module does

Entelim's Architecture Review Board module runs that process in software, not in someone's inbox. It holds every change proposal your board reviews, alongside the sessions where it was discussed and the decisions that came out of them. A review covers a decision brief, a solution, an architecture model or an architecture decision record. For every one of these, the evidence is captured and pinned for the review cycle: a decision brief is pinned as a version, and a solution, an architecture model or an architecture decision record as an evidence snapshot. The decision is recorded against that pinned evidence with its rationale and any conditions attached, so governance doesn't live in a separate record nobody trusts.

Decisions are approved, approved with conditions, rejected, or returned for more evidence or options. A person who submitted a review cannot also decide it. The board's sessions, standards, change requests and decision log sit alongside the reviews. The pinned evidence is the proposal's readiness record; a separate impact analysis is not attached to the review.

Where you'll meet it

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