Glossary
The words on this site mean specific things. Here’s what each one means.
Products
Decision Governance™ (DG)
Producing the decision record as a system of record at the moment a decision is made, not reconstructing it later. Our SaaS product for banks and credit unions.
DataVisuals™
The company — formally Data Visuals LLC. The decision governance company.
Decision Semantics™ Engine
The engine underneath the product: decisions that are owned, timely, reconstructable, and linked to the outcomes they produce.
AI Decisions
The add-on to Decision Governance that governs every AI the institution pays for — a named owner, the approving decision, the promised outcome, and whether it delivered.
Decision Governance™ Watch
A running feed of regulator actions and guidance where a decision-record gap is likely, surfaced from the sources the industry already reads and scored for Decision Governance relevance.
Decision Governance Platform
The software itself. It captures decisions as they’re made — owner, rationale, evidence, outcome — and produces them as a system of record on demand.
The framework
DGMM — Decision Governance Maturity Model
A framework for rating how disciplined an institution’s decision-making is: five levels across six facets. Free to use and cite; adapted from CMMI.
DGI — Decision Governance Index
The semiannual benchmark DataVisuals publishes showing how the regulated population is distributed across the DGMM. Cohort findings only; cells suppressed below n=15.
The five levels (L1–L5)
Initial, Managed, Defined, Measured, Optimizing. Cumulative — an institution doesn’t skip levels; Level 4 requires Level 3.
Governance Profile
Your confidential placement against the DGMM, computed inside the platform from your self-assessment and decision-record telemetry.
Governance Roadmap
Turns any gap on your Profile into an owned initiative — initiatives into milestones, milestones into governed decisions.
Composite floor
Your overall placement: a floor-with-exceptions across the six facets. The institution is only as governed as its weakest facet.
[S] / [T] / [P]
The three DGI data sources: Survey (self-assessment), Telemetry (de-identified data from live implementations), and Public regulatory record.
The [S]–[T] gap
The distance between what institutions say they do (Survey) and what the data shows they do (Telemetry) — the framework’s signature long-term finding.
CMMI
The Carnegie Mellon maturity model (1980s) whose five-level scaffold the DGMM is adapted from.
The six facets
The Plain Frame — the six questions a CRO, or an examiner opening a file, asks of any decision.
Ownership
Who’s doing it? Every consequential decision has a named owner on the record.
Timeliness
When are they doing it? Decisions close inside the cycle the work demands.
Reconstructability
Can they prove they did it? Rationale and evidence captured as the decision is made, not assembled afterward.
Override Discipline
Should it be overruled? Overrides are owned, justified, and pattern-visible.
Authority
Who has decision rights? Decisions sit at the level the policy says they sit.
Apex Linkage
Does the board see what produced this? Board decisions trace to the operational evidence beneath them. Requires L4+ on every other facet.
The decision record
Decision record
The queryable, exportable artifact that holds what people ask for later: what was decided, who owned it, who was consulted, why, the evidence in hand, and the outcome. Not an email thread.
Decision Anatomy — the five-stage record
Every decision as five stages, one record: Signal (what prompted it), Owner (who’s accountable), Decision (the call, and why), Action (what was done, with proof), and Outcome (the result, tracked back).
Examiner-ready
Decision records export on demand with full audit trail, supporting evidence, and outcome tracking — so exam prep isn’t a sprint pulling files out of email.
The Inbox
Your governed queue. Every consequential decision lands here with owner, due date, and workflow.
The Reference — the semantic contract
The schema behind every workflow: metrics, alerts, segments, decision types, states, personas, docs. Every workflow conforms to it — nothing bespoke.
Board & Strategic layer (apex)
Workflow 10. Board decisions inherit the operational evidence beneath them — capital, M&A, risk appetite, succession.
Board dossier
A cycle-level record of every board and strategic decision resolved in the quarter, each citing the operational decisions that produced it as structured evidence.
The ten workflows
The named decision domains DG governs, 01–10: regulatory compliance, BSA & fraud, credit & lending, ALM & treasury, vendor risk, model risk, member/customer risk, product performance, digital transformation, and strategic & board.
AI governance
AI asset
Any model, platform, agent, or vendor service the institution runs — the unit the AI inventory tracks.
Shadow AI
Models, tools, and agents in production that no inventory has ever counted.
Approved-use boundary
The constraints an AI asset’s approval actually established — what it was signed off to do.
Model attribution
When a model is the instrument, the record of what it recommended and what the human did with it. A property of every decision, not a separate product.
Follow rate
Of decisions where a model was consulted, how often the human went with its recommendation.
Override rate
The flip side of follow rate: how often the human went against the model’s recommendation.
Consultation rate
Of the relevant decisions, how many actually have a model linked to them — the attribution-coverage measure.
Boundary compliance
Of AI-influenced decisions, the share that stayed inside the asset’s approved-use boundary.
Governance posture
An AI portfolio’s placement scored on the same six DGMM facets — only as governed as its weakest one.
SR 26-2
The interagency model-risk standard examiners use. It deliberately leaves generative and agentic AI out of scope — the gap the AI register is built to cover today.
Regulatory shorthand
The anchors the workflows and facets map to. Named here because they show up across the site as shorthand.
BSA / AML
Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money-laundering obligations — the ground Workflow 02 governs.
SAR
Suspicious Activity Report — filed with FinCEN when activity warrants it.
ECOA / Reg B
The Equal Credit Opportunity Act and its implementing rule — fair-lending obligations, including adverse-action notices.
Reg O
The Federal Reserve rule governing credit extended to an institution’s own insiders.
CIP
Customer Identification Program — the identity requirements under the BSA.
OCC Heightened Standards
The OCC’s governance and risk-management expectations for larger institutions.
2023 Interagency Third-Party Guidance
The interagency standard for managing third-party and vendor risk — the anchor behind Workflow 05.