02.AAI and Data Governance
The written way a disagreement gets settled.
Every organisation already settles disagreements between its systems. Whoever is most senior in the room that day decides, and nothing is written down. This work replaces that person with a named owner, a written route, and a date.
The problem
Governance usually arrives as a document nobody reads
A policy is written, a committee is named, and a platform is bought. None of it answers the question that actually blocks the work: this system says one thing and that system says another, so which one is right. Without a written answer the disagreement gets settled by whoever is most senior in the room that day, and the next team inherits a decision with no reasoning attached.
From December 2026 an organisation making automated decisions about people has to be able to explain them. An explanation assembled after the fact is a reconstruction, and it shows.
What the work produces
Three things you keep
- 01
A definition register with owners
Every contested term written down once, with the person accountable for it named and the date the wording was agreed. Contested terms only. A register of everything is a register nobody maintains.
- 02
A resolution path
The written route a disagreement takes: who raises it, who decides, and how long they have. This is what replaces the most senior person in the room.
- 03
An automated-decision inventory
Where a system decides something about a person without a human in the loop, what it uses to decide, and what the organisation would say if asked to explain it.
The governed spine
This discipline is the spine
The other four answer to this one. A pipeline, a dashboard, a service, and an agent are all downstream of the question of what a term means, so this is the work that has to happen first, even when it is not the work that was commissioned.
Three artefacts, every engagement
- The written record of what a contested term means, who owns it, and the date the wording was agreed.
- Every hop a number takes from the system that first recorded it to the report that shows it.
- When a definition changed and why, written at the point the call was made rather than reconstructed afterward.
02.ACommission the work
Bring the term two systems report differently.
A 30-minute diagnostic, not a sales call. Bring the disagreement and the deadline that made it matter.
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