What is Digital Approval Lifecycle?

Treating approval as an event rather than a lifecycle is the common structural error. A document approved in March and revised in July has two approval states, and where the system records only the most recent, the question of what was authoritative in May becomes unanswerable. Lifecycle thinking also exposes the neglected stages — revision, where a small change may or may not require re-approval, and disposition, where an approved document that should have been retired stays in circulation because nothing ends its life. Because indexing in Centralpoint is tied to lifecycle, a document's position determines whether it is retrievable at all: drafts are not surfaced before approval and superseded versions leave the surface when replaced, which matters more with an AI layer than without one.