How ready is your organisation to govern AI?
Five questions, five minutes, and a scored snapshot across the five SCALE dimensions. This is the question an audit committee asks after the pilot succeeds and before the rollout starts.
Deployment readiness and governance readiness are not the same measure.
An organisation can be entirely ready to deploy artificial intelligence and entirely unready to govern it. The two are assessed differently, fail differently, and are owned by different people. Most readiness tools measure the first and report it as though it were the second.
The distinction becomes concrete the first time a board asks who signed off. If the answer is a committee, the answer is nobody. Governance ownership sits with one accountable person or it does not exist, and that single fact predicts more programme outcomes than any technology choice on the roadmap.
ISO/IEC 42001 made this assessable. It is the first management system standard for artificial intelligence, and it is built around the same question: is there a system of accountability around this, or is there a set of good intentions. Organisations pursuing certification find the gap in leadership and ethics long before they find it in architecture.
Five dimensions, weighted so that leadership carries the most.
The weights are Leadership 25, Strategy 20, Capability 20, Ethics 20, Architecture 15. Leadership carries the most because governance ownership is where these programmes most often fail, not because it is the most complex dimension.
Governance ownership
Whether one accountable person owns AI governance, with the authority to stop a deployment. The heaviest single weight in the model.
Direction and mandate
Whether AI activity is tied to a stated organisational outcome, and whether anyone can say what would make it stop.
People and skill
Whether the workforce can use, question and supervise these systems, and whether that capability is measured or assumed.
Assurance and harm
Whether impact, bias, transparency and recourse are assessed before deployment rather than after an incident.
Technical control
Whether the platform can enforce what policy requires: logging, access control, retention, and a way to turn something off.
A score out of 100 and a dimension breakdown.
You see the score, the tier, and where each of the five dimensions sits. As with the diagnostic, the written executive summary is optional and unlocks with a work email; the scoring itself completes in your browser before any email is entered.
The output is deliberately shaped to survive being forwarded. A dimension breakdown with a weighting you can see is a document an audit and risk chair can act on. A single number is not.
The weighting is our judgment, and we say so on screen.
The SCALE Framework and its weights are AltNexus’s, built from Government of Canada and enterprise governance engagements. No third party has validated the weights, and a different reasonable practitioner would set them differently. The instrument states this in its own methodology note rather than leaving you to discover it.
Five questions is a triage, not an assessment against a standard. It will tell you whether governance readiness is your binding constraint. It will not tell you whether you would pass an ISO/IEC 42001 audit.
Ten minutes, and you own the output.
Five questions. The fastest of the four, and the one most likely to change what your next board paper says.
An indicative self-assessment, not an audit and not professional advice. Where a figure is modelled rather than measured, the instrument says so on screen and shows the assumption.