Governance Register

The Governance Register records the activities and decisions of the Architecture Steering Committee and Architecture Review Board, and important milestones. This includes the acceptance of Principles, Standards, References, Architectures, dispensations for the application of principles, and more. It is a living register that is a vital ledger or diary of the architecture program. It will become indispensable when formal or legal investigations are conducted and human, business or technical issues are raised that concern the architectures or the processes by which they were devised and implemented.

Enterprise Architect can be used to store the Governance Register directly inside the repository using a Document Artifact or, if for some compliance reason it must be stored outside the repository, it can be linked to from an Artifact element within the repository.

Internal Register

The register can be set up in Enterprise Architect using a Document Artifact, which is an RTF document inside the repository. This has the advantage of being close to the elements of the Architecture, and links can be included to various parts of the Architecture. If security has been enabled, the element Register can be locked for update by the Chief Enterprise Architect, who should have the responsibility of maintaining it. The document can conveniently be exported to an external file if required.

Learn More: Document Artifact

External Register

There will be occasions when a register already exists or there is a corporate requirement that the register is stored in another tool such as a policy register or Intranet system. In these cases an Artifact element can be used as a placeholder to the external document or Web Page and a reference to it stored as a file or URL reference. This allows the Register to be visible and launched from inside the repository.

Learn More: Artifact