Alongside the Enterprise Security Committee sat a second body, and this is the one where architecture decisions were worked.
It carried leadership and technical representation from every domain that had to live with the outcome: network, servers, storage and database, data center, 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 — and it is also what made them stick, since a standard written with the people who carry it does not need to be enforced against them afterwards.
It ran for thirteen years, outlasting the security committee it sat beside, and was succeeded in November 2021 by the Architecture Review Board — the first of these bodies to carry capital planning, and a budget, as well as architecture.
Outcome
Patterns that operations could actually support, because the people who had to support them helped write them.