A seven-phase governed lifecycle: submission → peer review → ADB → under review → ready for decision → ARB review → decision. Risk-based fast-track via TDA for Low/Medium-risk decisions. Every step traceable to the principle that constrained it.
“Every architecture decision, ratified. Every principle, traceable. Every service, registered.”
§ Chief Enterprise ArchitectFull ARB review for High and Critical-risk decisions. TDA fast-track for Low and Medium — no bottleneck on routine choices.
Submission, peer review, ADB triage, under review, decision-ready, ARB or TDA, recorded. Every transition signed.
Inline comments. Threaded annotations. Track changes between revisions. Reviewers attributable.
Low / Medium-risk decisions bypass full ARB. Faster decisions where the stakes don’t justify a quorum.
Quorum, abstentions, dissenting opinions — all explicit. Decisions defensible because they are recorded.
Every ADR linked back to the EA principles it honours or challenges. Frameworks: TOGAF, Zachman, FEAF.
The decision, the context, the alternatives considered, the consequences accepted. All immutable.
Architecture Decision Records have been a recognised practice since Michael Nygard formalised the format in 2011. The problem is not awareness — most enterprise architecture teams know what an ADR is. The problem is that most ADR implementations are a folder of Markdown files in Confluence with no workflow, no review gate, and no mechanism to prevent them from becoming stale.
In a regulated environment, that is not good enough. An FCA-regulated firm that makes a technology architecture decision without documented review, without separation between proposer and approver, and without a traceable link to the EA principles it was measured against, has an audit exposure. The decision happened. It just cannot be proven to have been governed.
HelixGate treats the ADR as a governed artefact, not a document. The seven-phase lifecycle — Draft, Peer Review, ARB Review, Authority Decision, Ratified, Superseded, Rejected — enforces separation of duties at every gate. Authority routing is risk-based: a Low-risk decision can be fast-tracked through TDA. A High or Critical decision must clear the ARB with quorum. The reasoning, the votes, and the delegation chain are all part of the immutable record.
Supersession is first-class, not a workaround. When a decision is replaced, the original record is locked and linked to its successor. The architecture history is readable; the current state is unambiguous.
Walk us through your last big architecture call — we’ll show how the seven-phase lifecycle would have made it defensible.
