Software → Enterprise Architecture
Architecture Review Board
A group or forum that reviews significant technical decisions, creates alignment, and keeps architecture governance lightweight and useful.
Why it matters
Architecture Review Board helps senior engineers and engineering leaders make decisions that remain coherent across teams, platforms, products, and years of change.
Mental model
Think of architecture review board as a company-scale lens. Team-level design asks whether one service or feature is well built. Enterprise-level design asks whether many systems, teams, vendors, and data flows still fit together as the organization grows.
Where it fits
This concept belongs in Enterprise Architecture because it connects system design to organizational scope, governance, integration, risk, and long-term technology strategy.
Example
A growing company may have dozens of services, multiple data stores, third-party SaaS products, legacy systems, and several product lines. Architecture Review Board provides the language and decision structure for deciding what should be standardized, what should remain local, what should be migrated, and where platform investment should compound.
Common mistakes
- Treating architecture as diagrams instead of decisions.
- Creating governance that slows teams without improving decisions.
- Optimizing one team while making the company-wide system harder to operate.
- Ignoring lifecycle, ownership, and migration costs.
Related concepts
Use this concept together with system design, software architecture, technical governance, technology strategy, and platform strategy.