Architecture Governance

Chaired the City of Jacksonville’s Enterprise Security Committee, which functioned as the enterprise architecture review board, and authored its charter.

It was designed as an eight-member body: six independent, non-executive managers selected for depth in enterprise design, security, standards and architecture, plus the customer relationship manager, chaired by the Technology Officer. Decisions carried by majority vote, with the membership sized so ties could not occur and independent contributors held equal weight.

The charter was written so its chair could be outvoted. A review board whose chair always wins is not a review board — it is an approval queue, and nobody outside the room honours it.

Beneath the committee sat a full governance stack: senior management above, the ESC setting direction, an Enterprise Security Plan below that, and system architecture, policies and system-specific security plans at the base, so any control at the bottom traced upward to a decision somebody owned. The committee set risk appetite and the thresholds for accepting, avoiding and mitigating risk, and reviewed and approved the security business case and its funding — which is what gave its standards force in an estate where nothing could be mandated.

Alongside the ESC sat a second body, and it is the one where architecture decisions were actually worked: the Architecture Technology Governance Committee. It carried leadership and technical representation from every domain that had to live with the outcome — network, servers, storage and database, data centre, helpdesk and desktop engineering, mobility and security, application development, business analysis and quality assurance.

Governance that only involves architects produces standards architects like. Putting the operations and delivery teams in the room is what made the patterns supportable.

Raising architects is part of the same discipline: setting technical direction across a distributed team, running a working design review practice, and moving engineers into senior and lead roles.