Definition
The current degree to which an institution relies on a system: who depends on it, what would break without it, what expertise has been retained, and how long substitution would take. This is institutional dependence, meaning what the institution has come to rely on, and it is distinct from the record-level dependence in STD-07 Article III, which asks what a particular record rests on.
It matters because dependence quietly removes corrections from the menu. Tracked as a state, it can be scored through exposure score, read against the deployment's substrate profile, and countered by replenishing institutional reversibility. A dependence that also supplies the deployment's own evaluation is worse than its score suggests, which is why the record carries evaluation independence.
Tests that show it is in place
- A dependency record lists dependents, retained expertise, alternatives, and substitution time.
- The record is refreshed on a cadence rather than at incident time.
- A rise in dependence without a matching correction investment appears in a governance review.
Evidence to keep
- Artifact: A dependency record for the deployment, with dependents, alternatives, and retained expertise.
- Behavior: A dependency review that changed a roadmap decision, recorded with its reasoning.
- Metric: Number of dependent workflows and days to substitution, tracked quarterly.
References
- STD-07 Article III · Standard
- Dependence and reversibility eval · Eval