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Authority

Governance for enterprise operations: who may decide what

In operations the action is often irreversible and the key is often held by one person. Governance is the discipline that puts a recorded decision, with a named authority and the evidence they saw, in front of every such action, and keeps the record afterward.

A short path through this page. Open each step to go deeper.

1The five elements
  1. A recorded policy. Who may decide what, up to what amount, on which kinds of action, and which evidence must be present. Versioned, so a decision can be read against the policy in force when it was made.
  2. A named authority. Every consequential action has a person, a role and a permission behind it. Not a team, not a channel: a person.
  3. Dual control above a threshold. Above an amount the policy sets, a second named authority confirms. The two confirmations are recorded separately.
  4. Reversibility where it exists, and a stop where it does not. An action that can be reversed is recorded with its reversal path. An action that cannot be reversed is held until the authority and the evidence are complete.
  5. A sealed record. The proposal, the evidence, the decision, the action and the measured outcome are chained, so the sequence cannot be altered, removed or inserted into afterward.
2What SI may and may not do under this model

An agent may research, correlate, summarize, simulate and recommend. It may draft the proposal and attach the evidence. It may not change an authoritative record, approve a transaction, create a binding commitment, bypass a permission, or present a hypothetical action as a completed one. Authority is never inferred from what is visible in a context; it is read from the record of authority. How governed agents work in EOS.

3How EOS carries this model

Honos is the record of authority: who may decide what, against which clause, on which policy version, with which evidence. Minerva, the write side, carries out only what a person authorized, reversible and dual-controlled above a threshold, with every action on the chain of record. Nerio, the read side, never writes. The separation is deliberate: the part that reads cannot act, and the part that acts cannot decide.

4A first governance review

List the ten actions of the last quarter that could not have been reversed. For each, name the policy that allowed it, the person who approved it, the evidence they saw and where that record now lives. Where any of the four is missing, the governance model above names what to put in place. The two-week assessment does this review with you on the systems you name.

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