Technical Review Boards for Large Enterprises

[Chris Pearson]

At a large enterprise, the goal should be to stand up the gold standard of technical governance as described by ServiceNow's published white paper on the topic of platform governance. I've pulled out the main points related to the demand portion of that detailed document.

A technical review board governs the platform by ensuring your technical decisions align to your company's strategic roadmap, enterprise-wide architecture standards, and security requirements.

Regardless of the size of your company the goals of technical governance are the same.

• Protect the strategic value of your ServiceNow investment by maintaining an 'out of the box - first approach' to solving business problems.
• Enforce architectural standards, ServiceNow application design and coding best practices
• Minimize changes to out of the box code in the platform to ensure future upgrades of the platform are measured in days and weeks instead of months.

Stand up a technical review board by taking the following actions:

1. Recruit a Chair: Choose a platform architect or platform owner to lead the board.
2. Create a Charter: Define the board’s role in being the gate keeper for technical decisions, set and enforce design patterns and approaches, enforce development standards, best fit usage, and data governance
3. Recruit Stakeholders: Include roles such as platform architects, platform owner, IT domain owners, program managers, business analysts, quality assurance leads, security/compliance leads, development leads, and user experience leads
4. Define Responsibilities: Outline the board’s tasks, such as how to manage technical aspects of upgrades, integration standards, security/authentication standards, coding best practices, approval process for customization requests
5. Establish a Meeting Cadence: Meet every 1-2 months to review and approve demand requests, or as frequently as needed to maintain appropriate queue levels of unprocessed technical review requests.
6. Define Decision-Making Process: Majority-rules voting, consensus, seniority, or some other mechanism

Technical governance is one board of three which allows for complete and thorough platform governance. With the addition of a demand/intake board and an executive steering board, it sets large enterprises up for long-term success.