Kevin Parker, Chief Evangelist of Application Life Cycle Management at Serena Software (www.serena.com), says:

Electronic signatures provide an interesting psychological benefit. Once people know their approval and disapprovals are able to be tracked it makes them much more circumspect about the changes they approve.

Automating the change process moves change review boards from being defensive because of their lack of clarity and visibility and therefore a drag on the velocity of essential changes to being an empowering and enabling part of the lifecycle that improves not only the quality of the changes but actually improves the total throughput of changes.