What is a Change Advisory Board?
A Change Advisory Board (CAB) is a group of representatives from different areas of the organization who review, assess, and approve changes to IT systems, infrastructure, or key business services. The idea of a CAB comes from IT Service Management (ITSM) frameworks like the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
In these frameworks, the CAB helps manage risk by making sure changes are carried out in a structured and predictable way. An effective CAB helps organizations move quickly by carefully evaluating the impact, risks, dependencies, and resources needed for each proposed change before they are executed. CABs are especially important in industries where compliance and service continuity are critical, such as financial services, healthcare, SaaS companies, and large enterprises.
What are the responsibilities of a change advisory board?
The CAB’s primary responsibility is to ensure that changes deliver business value while minimizing unintended consequences, including:
- Assessing technical risk,
- Evaluating business impact,
- Confirming rollback plans, and
- Ensuring that changes align with organizational priorities and compliance requirements.
CABs also help schedule changes to prevent conflicts, like overlapping deployments that could use too many resources or increase the risk of outages. After a change is made, the CAB often reviews the results to see if the change met its goals and to find ways to improve future change processes.
How to Form an Effective Change Advisory Board
CAB members are chosen based on the needs and size of the organization, but the group is always made up of people with different backgrounds and expertise. Common members vary from IT operations managers to service desk leads. In regulated industries, compliance or risk officers may also be involved.
A well-structured CAB includes individuals who have the authority to make decisions and a deep understanding of their area. This often means senior IT staff who know how different systems connect, as well as business leaders who can speak for customers and commercial needs.
But CAB members should not just come from IT. Adding product managers, operations leaders, or data protection officers helps make sure changes are reviewed from all angles, not just a technical point of view. The most important factor is not the job title, but the ability to assess risk, make decisions, and take responsibility for results.
What are the categories of changes being reviewed by CAB?
CABs group changes into categories to make decision-making more efficient. These are:
- Standard changes or the low-risk, pre-approved, and repeatable requests. For example, routine password resets or adding a user to a system. These changes usually bypass full CAB review.
- Normal changes or those that require formal assessment and approval because they can affect performance, security, or availability. Examples include launching a new application feature or changing network settings.
- Emergency changes or urgent requests that deal with critical issues like security problems or system outages. These changes can be approved by an emergency CAB (ECAB), a smaller group that can make quick decisions while remaining accountable.
Change Advisory Board vs Change Control Board
The terms Change Control Board (CCB) and Change Advisory Board are often used interchangeably, but they reflect slightly different approaches. A CCB usually has formal authority to approve or reject changes and is common in strict, compliance-focused areas such as engineering, manufacturing, or regulated IT.
In contrast, a CAB is more advisory and focuses on group assessment and recommendations, though it may still approve changes. In most modern ITSM frameworks, especially those based on ITIL, ‘CAB’ is the preferred term because it highlights guidance, shared responsibility, and alignment with business goals.