Approval Chain Governance

An approval chain is a sequence of required decisions, and governing it means three things are fixed in advance rather than negotiated per document: who holds each decision, what happens when one of them is unavailable, and what constitutes proof that the decision was made. Chains fail in predictable ways. A delegation arrangement nobody recorded means an approval was granted by someone without the authority; an out-of-office bypass added for convenience becomes permanent; a chain designed for one document class gets reused for another where the stakes are different. The evidence question is the one that surfaces during audit — not whether approval happened, but whether the person who granted it was entitled to and whether the version approved is the version published.

Approval state in Centralpoint is a property of the record rather than of a separate workflow system, so the approval, the version it applied to and the identity that granted it stay attached to the document. Where an AI layer drafts or summarizes content, that output enters the same chain as human-authored material rather than bypassing it, and governance-tier skills can require escalation to a named approver for classes of content that must never be published automatically.