What would you say are the key aspects of the architecture review board?
The review board is responsible for helping, at least at the initial stages of a project, with the service architecture. Things like: "So what should the macro services be? And how do they relate to things that already exist?" The review board also maintains the business enterprise architecture, which is never static. And they are available as internal consultants for projects to help make decisions that are architectural in nature.
The architecture review board is not just a technology organization; we've created it as a subcommittee to our product steering committee so it will be more business focused.
How does that work?
The product steering committee is comprised of all the product owners across the business and is responsible for approving all new business product-related projects. We attached the architecture review board as a subcommittee so that it would not become a technology group for technology's sake, but a technology group that's responsible for supporting business projects.
It's one of the lessons I've learned having done SOA three or four times in different organizations. The last time I did an architecture review board we did it as a technology group and it didn't work nearly as well.
Do you have an example yet of a product that's gone through this process?
Recently, we were enhancing some of the features that we want to provide for our customers in video on-demand. The project team designed an architecture that we brought to the architecture review board. The board took a look at it and found a way to cut several months off the development schedule by reusing some of the capabilities that existed within the provisioning engine and within the new billing system we put together.
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