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AAOE
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Governance Reference Architecture

Purpose

Governance is the architectural system responsible for establishing, exercising, preserving, and auditing engineering authority across AAOE. It is a capability architecture, not a workflow: it describes what governance must provide, not the sequence of steps any single Task follows.

This specification does not redefine governance rules already established elsewhere in AAOE. It explains how the governance capabilities implied by those rules relate to one another.

Architectural Principles

This architecture reuses principles already established elsewhere in AAOE:

  • Evidence precedes authority.
  • Authority precedes specification.
  • Governance preserves engineering knowledge.
  • Traceability preserves accountability.
  • Human governance is explicit.
  • Separation of authority and execution.

Governance Capabilities

  • Policy Management — maintains the governance rules defined across AAOE's lifecycle specifications, so they can be applied consistently.
  • Decision Management — supports the Architectural Decision Lifecycle: proposing, reviewing, and recording decisions.
  • Authority Management — tracks where architectural authority currently resides, from acceptance through supersession.
  • Approval Management — supports Architecture Review and release approval: capturing outcomes and the reasoning behind them.
  • Traceability Enforcement — ensures every governed artifact identifies its upstream authority, per the Traceability Model.
  • Auditability — makes governed decisions and their rationale examinable after the fact.
  • Identity & Accountability — associates governance actions with the human or role that took them.
  • Separation of Duties — keeps proposal, review, approval, and integration held by distinct roles, per Roles & Responsibilities.
  • Compliance Validation — checks that artifacts satisfy the criteria their governing specification defines before they advance.
  • Governance Observability — provides visibility into the state of governed work: what is proposed, under review, approved, or superseded.

Each capability has a defined responsibility. This specification does not define how any capability is implemented.

Authority Model

Evidence
        ↓
Decision
        ↓
Specification
        ↓
Delegation
        ↓
Implementation
        ↓
Review
        ↓
Approval

Authority originates from evidence: a validated Discovery. It becomes architectural authority only once a Decision is accepted, and that authority is formalized when a Specification is derived from it. Authority is then delegated — through a Work Order — into Implementation, which carries no authority of its own. Authority is exercised again, by a human, at Review and Approval. Authority never originates in Implementation, Delegation, or any capability that executes rather than decides.

Governance Relationships

  • Platform — governance capabilities are among the capabilities the Platform Reference Architecture's Governance Services provide.
  • Engineering Knowledge — governance is what makes knowledge canonical, per the Engineering Knowledge Reference Architecture's definition of canonical knowledge.
  • AI Agents — governance bounds what agents may do, per the AI Agent Reference Architecture's Agent Boundaries and Trust Boundaries.
  • Work Orders — governance determines when a Work Order may be created and what its Implementation Report must satisfy to be approved.
  • Releases — governance determines the criteria a Release must meet, per Release Management.

Human Governance

Authority remains human-governed because acceptance, approval, and release are the points at which accountability is assigned to a specific responsible party. This is consistent with AAOE's human-governed contribution model: proposals, however produced, become official only through human review and approval.

AI Governance Participation

AI Agents may participate in governance capabilities through:

  • Recommendations — surfacing candidate decisions or approvals for a human to consider.
  • Analysis — evaluating artifacts against specification criteria to support a reviewer's judgment.
  • Validation support — checking compliance criteria mechanically, ahead of human approval.

AI Agents never hold approval authority. Every governance capability that grants or exercises authority — Decision Management, Approval Management, and Authority Management in particular — remains a human action, consistent with the Trust Boundaries defined by the AI Agent Reference Architecture.

Cross-Cutting Governance

The following span every governance capability rather than belonging to a single one:

  • Identity — every governance action is attributable to a specific actor.
  • Traceability — every governance capability operates on artifacts whose upstream authority is known.
  • Auditability — every governance capability's actions remain examinable.
  • Policy Enforcement — governance rules apply uniformly regardless of which capability is acting.
  • Observability — the state of governance is visible across all capabilities, not isolated to one.

Governance Boundaries

Governance does not control:

  • Implementation details
  • Technology selection
  • Programming language
  • Framework choice
  • Deployment strategy

These remain architectural or organizational decisions, made within the scope and constraints a Work Order defines, not governance concerns themselves.

Extensibility

Organizations may add governance capabilities beyond those listed here, provided each preserves the Authority Model and the separation between authority and execution this architecture establishes.

Future Evolution

Governance capabilities may evolve — for example, in how policy is managed or compliance is validated — while preserving the architectural consistency this specification describes: authority originates from evidence, is formalized through decisions and specifications, and is exercised only by accountable humans.