An agent being technically capable of an action does not mean that the organisation has authorised it. OSIO’s architecture separates four ideas:
- Capability — what a system is technically able to do.
- Authority — what it is permitted to do for a particular responsibility.
- Policy — the rules and boundaries that govern that permission.
- Human judgement — a decision that should remain with a person because it depends on context, consequences or approval.
Permission should come from the organisation’s applicable authority and policy, not from a model’s suggestion, an external message or an executor’s ability to call a tool.
Needs You
“Needs You” is OSIO’s product concept for work that requires genuine human judgement, a decision or an approval. The Owner or another appropriate decision-maker should be given the relevant context and the reason the work cannot responsibly continue within its current authority.
The intended experience is not a person approving every routine step. OSIO should be able to make progress independently inside clearly bounded authority and involve the Owner or another person with relevant decision authority when judgement genuinely matters.
When work should stop
If required authority is missing, information is materially uncertain or the next action depends on a judgement the system should not make, consequential work should pause rather than silently proceed. Once a person supplies the needed decision or approval, work may continue within the resulting boundaries.
These statements describe OSIO’s design principles. They do not claim that every authority control or approval flow is currently available in a generally released product.