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 honors it.
Why an architecture board carried the security mandate
The committee predated the City’s Chief Security Officer post. Through these years security policy, procedures and technology governance were set here rather than by a dedicated security executive, which is the reason an architecture review board held that mandate at all. It is also why the charter had to be written carefully: a body with no executive owner above it and no authority to compel anyone below it survives only on the legitimacy of how it decides.
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. That last power is what gave its standards force in an estate where nothing could be mandated: an agency free to ignore a standard is not free to ignore the funding attached to it.
Outcome
Standards adopted voluntarily by agencies free to decline them, in an estate where nothing could be mandated.