Change Advisory Board (CAB)

What is Change Advisory Board (CAB)?

A Change Advisory Board (CAB) is a cross-functional group of stakeholders who evaluate, prioritize, and approve changes within an organization before those changes are implemented. Typically composed of representatives from IT, operations, security, and business units, the CAB helps ensure that changes align with organizational goals, minimize risks, and maintain service stability.

The CAB’s role is to review change requests, assess their potential impact and risks, and recommend whether to approve, defer, or reject them. This collaborative governance process adds structure and accountability to change management, especially for complex or high-impact changes.

Key Takeaways

• CAB is a multidisciplinary team that reviews and approves organizational changes.
  
  
• It balances risk, business needs, and technical feasibility.
  
  
• Helps prevent unauthorized or poorly planned changes.
  
  
• Enhances communication and alignment across departments.
  
  
• Siit supports CAB processes through approval workflows, dependency mapping, and integrated communication tools.
  

Why the CAB Matters

In fast-moving organizations, changes happen constantly — software updates, infrastructure adjustments, policy revisions, and more. Without a structured review, changes can lead to outages, compliance issues, or conflicting priorities.

The CAB acts as a gatekeeper, ensuring that changes are carefully evaluated for risk, impact, and readiness before they’re pushed live. This reduces incidents caused by faulty or ill-timed changes and fosters trust across teams.

CAB in Action

Consider a company planning a major upgrade to its customer support platform. The change involves new software deployment, data migration, and staff training.

The CAB convenes to review the plan, involving IT leads who assess technical risks, security experts who check compliance, and business stakeholders who weigh impact on service levels.

They identify potential downtime windows, approve phased rollouts, and recommend contingency plans. With this collective input, the change proceeds smoothly, avoiding unexpected disruptions.

How Siit Supports CAB Functions

Siit streamlines CAB workflows by embedding approval processes directly into your change management lifecycle. Using Rapid Approvals, decision-makers can review and vote on change requests from Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Siit’s platform — no need for endless meetings or email chains.

With Dependency Mapping, Siit visualizes how proposed changes affect interconnected systems and teams, helping the CAB understand risks in context.

Siit’s integrations with Jira, Zendesk, and knowledge bases like Notion or Confluence provide easy access to relevant documentation, enabling informed decisions.

Collaborative features such as comments, request followers, and real-time notifications keep everyone aligned and accountable throughout the review process.

Want to make your CAB more effective and agile? Sign up for a free trial and see how Siit simplifies change governance and approval workflows.