{"schema_version":1,"assessment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_opportunity320_20260801","source_experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_full320_20260801","cell_id":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management__organizational_management","archetype_slug":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management","domain_slug":"organizational_management","title":"Authority-Gated Lifecycle Management for Obsolete Policies and Procedures","opportunity_summary":"Evaluate whether explicit lifecycle states, retention and hold checks, supersession markers, dependency review, and reversible quarantine can keep obsolete organizational guidance from appearing authoritative while preserving reconstructable history. The incremental comparison is the existing current-policy portal and search approach; prevalence, effect size, demand, and distinctiveness remain unverified.","adopter_authorizer":"The likely adopter is a business unit operating an organizational knowledge repository. Policy owners authorize changes to authority status, records management controls disposition classes, legal or compliance controls holds, and irreversible destruction requires documented concurrence from all relevant authorities.","scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":3,"rationale":"Reducing employee use of conflicting or obsolete guidance could improve decision quality and reduce resolution work while preserving accountability, but the sealed candidate provides no evidence about how frequently obsolete artifacts are encountered or how consequential resulting errors are."},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":2,"rationale":"Employees, policy owners, records managers, and compliance functions have proposal-specific reasons to care, but no adopter request, observed demand, budget commitment, or demonstrated dissatisfaction with the current portal is supplied."},"incremental_advantage":{"score":4,"rationale":"Unlike search ranking or a manually curated portal, the proposal governs underlying authority state, holds, dependencies, supersession, quarantine, and restoration. This is a coherent incremental mechanism, although its practical advantage remains untested."},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"The combination of authority gating, retention controls, search demotion, dependency checking, and reversible quarantine is differentiated from the stated nearest rival, but prior art is unsearched and world novelty cannot be inferred closed-book."},"technical_implementability":{"score":4,"rationale":"A pilot limited to two policy families and 30 artifacts can plausibly use inventory, metadata labels, audit logs, access-tier changes, and reversible quarantine. Repository integration quality and dependency detection remain uncertain."},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"The candidate identifies the required policy, records, legal, and compliance authorities and reserves destructive decisions to documented concurrence, but coordinating these parties and securing continuing owner review may be difficult."},"evidence_readiness":{"score":4,"rationale":"The eight-week bounded comparison names problem and intervention falsifiers, observable benefit measures, harm triggers, and rollback. Retrieval events, attribution rules, denominators, and restoration acceptance criteria still require preregistration."},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":4,"rationale":"Reversible quarantine, audit-logged label rollback, hold protection, dependency checks, and preservation of historical authority directly reduce the risks of mistaken retirement and lost organizational memory; these safeguards still require validation."},"scalability":{"score":3,"rationale":"Lifecycle states and governance rules could extend across repositories and policy families, but heterogeneous retention obligations, local interpretations, informal copies, unresolved dependencies, and recurring owner review may create substantial scaling friction."}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"10K_TO_50K","scope":"Prepare and run the eight-week, one-business-unit comparison covering two policy families and at most 30 artifacts, including inventory, labeling, review, measurement setup, compliance coordination, reversible quarantine, and analysis.","confidence":"MODERATE","assumptions":["Existing repository access, audit logging, and staff are available.","No custom enterprise integration or hard deletion is included.","Policy, records, and compliance reviewers can participate within normal internal workflows.","The comparison uses the existing current-policy portal."]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Configure a production-ready lifecycle taxonomy and workflow for one business unit, establish authority and escalation rules, integrate repository status and search demotion, document rollback, train owners, and validate hold and restoration controls.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["A configurable repository and identity system already exist.","Deployment remains within one business unit and a bounded set of policy families.","Legal and records requirements do not require major platform replacement.","Dependency checks may combine automation with manual review."]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Launch across multiple business units or repositories, including integration, artifact migration and classification, governance design, security and compliance validation, change management, training, evaluation, and initial remediation of stale inventories.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["The organization has multiple repositories and policy-owning groups.","Existing systems can expose metadata, permissions, links, holds, and audit records.","Substantial manual classification and cross-functional coordination are required.","This scope excludes wholesale replacement of enterprise content-management platforms."]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Operate lifecycle reviews, owner attestations, hold and dependency checks, repository administration, audit support, training, metrics, restoration testing, exception handling, and software or integration maintenance across a multi-unit deployment.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Recurring human governance is required rather than fully automatic classification.","Artifact volume, organization size, repository count, and licensing terms are unspecified.","Periodic restoration and compliance testing continue after launch.","The organization maintains dedicated or allocated records, policy, legal, and technical capacity."]}},"research_burden":"MODERATE","earliest_credible_horizon":"0_TO_3_MONTHS","pipeline_gates":{"recognizable_externally_supportable_problem":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The candidate specifies observable conflicting artifacts and a clear problem falsifier, but no external or local evidence establishes that this problem materially occurs in a prospective adopter organization."},"identifiable_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"The candidate identifies a business unit and repository as the adoption setting and assigns authority among policy owners, records management, legal, and compliance functions."},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"The proposal can be compared with the existing current-policy portal on obsolete-guidance retrieval or use, conflict-resolution time, unresolved stale artifacts, broken references, missed obligations, and restoration performance."},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"The sealed candidate authorizes an eight-week review of two policy families and at most 30 artifacts, with reversible quarantine only and explicit comparison and falsification conditions."},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"YES","reason":"Automatic deletion, age-only retirement, hold overrides, substantive policy changes through metadata, and removal with unresolved dependencies are excluded; missed holds, broken references, disputes, exposure, or failed restoration require stopping and rollback."},"implementation_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"YES","reason":"The bounded pilot, one-unit startup, multi-unit launch, and recurring governance activities can be scoped into broad resource-equivalent bands, although organization size and repository complexity make those ranges uncertain."}},"blocking_evidence":["A bounded inventory showing whether materially obsolete or conflicting artifacts remain discoverable, influence work, or persist because obligations and dependencies are unresolved.","Baseline evidence that employees retrieve or use obsolete guidance and that the issue is not primarily ambiguity within current policy.","Comparative evidence that lifecycle governance improves outcomes beyond the current-policy portal without broken references, missed obligations, unauthorized exposure, or failed restoration.","Confirmation that policy, records, legal, and compliance authorities will review artifacts and accept the proposed state transitions and rollback process.","Prior-art research determining whether the full lifecycle composition is materially distinct from existing records-management, policy-governance, enterprise-search, and knowledge-management practices."],"next_evidence_step":"In one consenting business unit, preregister event definitions and inspect two policy families containing at most 30 artifacts, then conduct the authorized eight-week comparison between the current-policy portal and lifecycle review. Permit only authority-approved labeling and reversible quarantine. Falsify the problem if no material obsolete or conflicting artifacts are discoverable, influential, or retained because obligations or dependencies are uncertain; falsify the intervention if it does not improve obsolete-guidance retrieval or use, resolution time, or unresolved-staleness measures, or if any broken reference, missed obligation, unauthorized exposure, or failed restoration occurs.","research_questions":["How often do employees encounter or rely on obsolete or contradictory artifacts rather than one controlled source?","What proportion of retained artifacts cannot be retired because ownership, dependencies, retention classes, or holds are unresolved?","Does lifecycle governance outperform the current-policy portal on preregistered retrieval, use, resolution-time, and unresolved-staleness measures?","Can dependency, hold, governing-status, and restoration checks achieve acceptable safety performance?","Will policy owners and control functions complete reviews reliably enough to prevent lifecycle labels from becoming stale?","How does the complete mechanism composition compare with existing records-management, policy-governance, enterprise-search, and knowledge-management practices?","What repository integration and recurring review effort is required when expanding beyond two policy families?"] ,"recommendation":"VALIDATE_PROBLEM_FIRST","uncertainty_constraints":["Problem prevalence and consequence magnitude are unsupported by external or adopter-specific evidence.","Stakeholder demand, willingness to adopt, and authority participation have not been demonstrated.","The incremental effect relative to the current-policy portal is hypothetical.","Prior art and world novelty are unmeasured.","Repository complexity, artifact volume, licensing, compliance requirements, and organization size are unspecified, limiting cost confidence.","Informal copies, oral practice, socially interpreted authority, and past-case applicability may escape lifecycle metadata.","Measurement definitions and attribution rules are not yet fully specified."],"closed_book_prior_art_boundary":"Prior art is unsearched and unverified. This closed-book assessment evaluates only the internal plausibility and testability of the supplied candidate and makes no claim about novelty, prevalence, market availability, or superiority to existing records-management, policy-governance, enterprise-search, or knowledge-management practices."}