Companion assessment
Rate your program, honestly
A companion to The Non-Human Majority. Maturity is uneven, you can be advanced in one dimension and primitive in another, so rate each dimension on its own evidence, then track the metrics that a skeptic cannot wave away.
The maturity matrix
The scorecard
Metrics map to the four questions, plus the agent frontier. They are written to resist the easy answer, coverage against a denominator you can defend, privilege against observed use, runtime against enforceable response, and ownership against a tested path to stop the actor.
What are you?
Coverage and resolution
- Percent of authoritative systems connected
- Percent of authentication events resolved to a principal
- Number of unresolved privileged principals
- Entity-resolution confidence, and data freshness
What authority are you exercising?
Privilege and effective reach
- Granted versus observed permissions
- Unused privileged entitlements
- Identities with cross-environment authority
- Crown-jewel resources reachable, and effective high-risk paths
What are you doing now?
Runtime and containment
- Percent of critical actions attributable to a resolved principal
- Mean time to detect misuse, mean time to contain
- Percent of high-confidence events safely contained, and the false-containment rate
- Percent of critical systems with enforceable, not merely visible, controls
Who owns and can stop you?
Accountability
- Verified technical-owner and business-sponsor coverage
- Orphaned privileged identities
- Percent with a tested revocation or containment path
- Percent of on-behalf-of actions that retain the delegating user
The agent frontier
Agent and delegation governance
- Agents using unique versus shared principals
- Approved agent-to-tool relationships, and unsanctioned ones
- Agents with destructive capabilities, sponsors, and tested kill switches
- Actions that retain task, user, and purpose context
If you track only one line, track the gap between agents discovered and agents governed, against a discovery count that is itself still climbing. When those diverge, the accountability gap is widening.