Enterprise architecture review boards are essential for a mature EA practice in any organization. Let's explore how you can set up an EA review board and why it's so vital.
Establishing an enterprise architecture review board is an essential step to developing your enterprise architecture practice. It's something we're seeing our customers doing across all stages of their journey to EA maturity.
Setting up an enterprise architecture review board is becoming such a common step that it's listed by The Open Group - the authority on the discipline of EA - as a key feature of a mature enterprise architecture practice. It's also worth noting that setting up a review board is listed as part of the third of five stages of EA maturity.
This means that, far from being an advanced feature of mature EA practices, enterprise architecture review boards should be established somewhere in the middle of your EA development journey. As soon as you've moved beyond setting up your first EA projects and started building enterprise architecture as a permanent function of your business, you should have a review board in place.
Let's explore why enterprise architecture review boards are so valuable for organizations looking to optimize their architecture. We'll also consider how you can go about establishing one, who should be on it, and what it should do.
Enterprise architecture review boards are a feature of a mature enterprise architecture function within your organization. To benchmark your own enterprise architecture maturity, use our free tool:
ASSESSMENT: Enterprise Architecture Maturity
What Is An Enterprise Architecture Review Board?
Enterprise architecture review boards are councils of stakeholders from across all aspects of your organization that serve EA governance in your architecture optimization efforts. By ensuring every facet of your business is represented on the board, you can gain an unbiased view of the effectiveness of your EA strategy.
All IT and business initiatives should be reviewed by your EA board to ensure that the projects support your architecture goals and business objectives, and also that your architecture is optimized to support your initiatives. Boards should avoid becoming a hurdle for projects to overcome, but instead offer guidance and support to ensure all your initiatives are acting in synergy with your architecture.
Review boards confirm that all your projects conform to industry best-practice, regulatory compliance, and alignment with procedures across your organization. They also work to document enterprise architecture decisions, and how they impact and are impacted by ongoing and past initiatives.
Establishing a board serves to unlock greater communication and collaboration across all the different aspects of your organization. It also helps to mitigate the risk of costly mistakes, or those that cause ill will between different departments in your business.
Best of all, the board will act as advocates of enterprise architecture as a discipline. By interacting with the board, your people will develop an awareness of the value of EA, which serves to support enterprise architecture democratization.
It's no wonder that enterprise architecture review boards are becoming standard practice for any developed EA practice. How do you go about creating your own, however?
How Do You Set Up An EA Review Board?
The key to establishing an enterprise architecture review board is to secure executive sponsorship. Your first step is to ensure that your review board is acting on the authority of senior leadership and should ideally secure a representative of the C-suite (usually the CTO or CIO) as a member.
The goal of your approach should be to establish the value of review boards for governance and strategic alignment with your sponsor. You can then work with them establishing the mission, scope, composition, and processes of the board.
Next, approach your stakeholders and find those who are enthusiastic about being involved. You should sell the position on the board as an opportunity for stakeholders to raise their profile and make real change in the organization.
In pitching to both your executive sponsor and other potential board members, you should aim to minimize the amount of effort required from members and maximize their potential impact. Meetings should be regular enough to maintain momentum, but not so regular as to be disruptive, and ideally kept short by a rapid presentation-proposal-approval process.
To maintain momentum between meetings, it's important to establish communication channels and assign someone to update them regularly with training, information, and progress updates, as well as information about the agenda for upcoming meetings and progress reports on decisions made in previous meetings. To maintain continuity in EA governance, it's vital to gather feedback and insights on previous decisions and the progress of previously assessed initiatives.
Above all else, your board members must be engaged in the process. As well as respecting their time and effort, it's also important to select the right group.
Who Is On An Enterprise Architecture Review Board?
Enterprise architecture review boards should be made up of enterprise architecture advocates who have unique insights into different facets of your organization. They don't need to have extensive knowledge or experience of enterprise architecture, but simply a passion for it.
There is an extent to which a lack of enterprise architecture experience can be a benefit to a minority of board members. Balancing a selection of technical and non-technical members gives you a perspective on both what can be achieved and why actions need to be undertaken, and how those actions will impact your users.
Non-technical users who are placed in teams throughout your organization can also act as EA evangelists, spreading the word about the value of enterprise architecture and explaining the reasoning behind EA decisions on the ground. This allows review boards to serve change management efforts, as well as governance.
So, we've established that an enterprise architecture review board should include a C-suite sponsor and a balance of technical and non-technical members, but who else should be involved? This will vary depending on the circumstances of your unique organization, but as a starting template, you should generally look to involve:
- A C-suite-level sponsor, such as your CIO or CTO
- Senior-level IT representatives
- Your chief and senior enterprise architects
- Technical specialists in a range of different areas
- Compliance and security officers
- Senior business representatives from each department
- A selection of non-technical users from different teams and business areas
Of course, once you have this team of people together, what is it they should be doing? Let's consider what an EA review board should actually do.
What Does An EA Review Board Do?
Enterprise architecture review boards have a set mandate for overseeing EA governance across your organization. It's key, however, for the work of the board to remain light-touch, both to respect the time of contributors and to prevent friction with project teams.
An enterprise architecture review board should look to meet either monthly or quarterly depending on how fast-moving your architecture projects are. Should an urgent decision be required, an exceptional meeting of the board can be called.
Short And To The Point
In the spirit of respecting your members' time, meetings should be short and to the point. Your goal should be for a representative from a project team to present on the current status of an ongoing or proposed initiative for feedback and approval.
Key here is that none of the information being presented should be new. To accelerate decisions, all the information should be made available to board members long in advance of the meeting, so that they can prepare their responses.
Don't Be A Blocker
Once again, the aim shouldn't be to act as a road block to initiatives, but to provide guidance and advice to project teams in order to enhance their work. Presenting an initiative to the board should be something teams look forward to as a relief and a benefit, not something they dread.
Members should then be given the chance to feed back on the project and raise any objections or issues. Project teams can then take that feedback away and improve and enhance their project, then bring back updated proposals to future meetings.
Once all considerations have been addressed, then the board can give the enhanced project their approval and it's free to move forward without facing unforeseen issues in the future. The rest of the business can also be re-assured that the project isn't going to disrupt other operations.
Continuous Touchpoints
The end of the meeting shouldn't be the end of the process, however. All presentations, feedback, and decisions should be comprehensively documented, and there should be a person or persons who take ownership of the documentation process, and ensure that the documentation is shared with all parties.
Finally, some time in the meetings should be dedicated to reviewing previous decisions and ensuring the advice given was sound. Learnings from successes and failures should then inform future decisions.
Growing EA Maturity With SAP LeanIX
Enterprise architecture review boards are powered by documentation and data. SAP LeanIX offers a single source of truth to store and align your enterprise architecture data with your review board documentation.
With our new visualization features, your project teams can even present their project data directly within our live system. Our customers are even telling us that their leaders are responding to Powerpoint presentations by asking to see the live data within SAP LeanIX.
Both enterprise architecture review boards and SAP LeanIX are essential tools for driving forward the evolution of your enterprise architecture. Increased EA maturity means increased value for your EA projects, and that means enhanced agility and resilience for your organization.
Enterprise architecture review boards are a feature of a mature enterprise architecture function within your organization. To benchmark your own enterprise architecture maturity, use our free tool:
