Architecture Governance
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Many companies that I talk to are trying to up-level their architecture governance. It seems to be a new trend to prioritize architecture governance and it’s great to see!
I get a lot of questions about architecture governance such as:
- what are best practices
- what approaches have we put in place in Salesforce IT
- what should be avoided
- how do you measure success of governance
First let me start with WHY you want to create a level of architecture governance in all companies.
In a nutshell, good architecture governance helps increase business agility.
Yes, I know it seems counter-intuitive but governance done well can actually speed things up. If you know how to easily find architecture standards, principles, reference and implementation architectures, you can move more quickly to create solution architectures that are fast, efficient, secure and manageable. The opposite is true — if you need to hunt around to find architecture information, you can waste a lot of time, get frustrated and worst of all, create poor solution architectures.
So what should architecture governance look like? I recommend the following architecture governance components:
- Architecture Principles — “When you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there” — James Carroll. Step one in architecture governance is to define your principles. You can find our Salesforce IT principles and a process to define your own principles in this blog: https://brettcolbert.medium.com/architecture-principles-eb2bd4101924
- Enterprise Architecture Review Board (EARB) — Step two in architecture governance is a regularly scheduled forum for people to propose or request changes or additions to your company’s architecture. This forum typically consists of architects, enterprise architects, lead developers and security architects. The EARB reviews requests and gauges alignment to architecture principles as well as future state architecture.
- Architecture Community of Practice (ACoP) — Step three in architecture governance is having a regularly scheduled meeting of your architects in which they cover…
