The mechanical rule behind every Readiness Score, AI-housekeeping flag and certified-competence requirement.
None of this is judged capability by capability from scratch. Every capability gets classified once, and three separate flags fall out of that single classification — mechanically, not as a fresh judgment call each time.
Governance or Operational — the One Classification That Drives Everything
Every capability is marked one of two things:
- Governance — it actively validates, deduplicates, routes for approval, consolidates, or tracks the lineage/ownership of the domain’s data
- Operational — it’s a real, useful capability that uses the domain’s data but doesn’t itself govern its quality or correctness
This single classification is what the heatmap scores, live, off the underlying data — never a hardcoded percentage.
From Classification to the Three Flags
- Readiness Score Tracked — Governance capabilities are tracked; Operational capabilities aren’t. Same rule, no new judgment.
- AI Housekeeping Candidate — judged independently: yes where the work is repetitive, rule-based, or pattern-detectable (validation, duplicate detection, monitoring, integration); no where it needs human judgment, negotiation, or structural design. The same capability name gets the same verdict everywhere it recurs.
- Certified Competence Required — derived from who’s accountable: yes for the governance-accountable and analytical roles; no for the role that simply runs the process day to day.
Who’s Accountable, by a Fixed Rule
Accountability is a separate question from what a capability is, and it follows one fixed rule rather than a case-by-case decision:
- Business Process, Governance → Data Steward
- Business Process, Operational → Domain Subject-Matter Expert
- Platforms & Tools, Governance → Data Owner
- Platforms & Tools, Operational → Domain Subject-Matter Expert
- Each People & Competencies capability maps to one fixed role
Why This Matters
A method judged fresh every time, capability by capability, is a set of opinions. A method built on one classification and a handful of fixed rules is auditable — anyone can check whether the rule was actually followed, capability by capability, domain by domain. It’s also why the same capability name always gets the same verdict wherever it shows up — see the Proof sections on SEE IT, STEER IT and KEEP IT.
Related: SEE IT · STEER IT · KEEP IT · The Governance Heatmap · Home
