Method and governance
BROCS inclusion criteria, evidence policy, versioning, independence, and corrections.
BROCS is a public working method for naming gaps in enterprise AI enablement. It makes no claim of consensus and provides no certification or benchmark. Boundaries change when field evidence shows that a definition omits a distinct operational responsibility.
The assessment reports current coverage. Its per-letter labels state how many of five criteria can be supported by evidence. They do not establish a maturity sequence, and scores are comparable only when the scope and evidence standard are the same.
Inclusion criteria
A new letter needs to meet each condition below.
- It names a distinct operational question with an accountable owner.
- Its absence produces a failure that another letter does not already describe.
- An organization can perform well elsewhere while remaining weak in this capability.
- An established adjacent discipline provides practices that can be tested here.
A vertical uses narrower criteria, but it still needs a recognizable job, failure, and test. Remote access entered Control in version 1.1 because repeated buyer questions exposed a coherent gap. The reason and date are recorded in the changelog.
Evidence policy
Claims are labeled by the evidence behind them.
- A framework claim is an argument that can be tested against an architecture or operating practice.
- A field observation comes from practitioner conversations and is labeled as such.
- A factual claim about an incident, regulation, standard, or measured population needs an inspectable source. Primary sources take priority; independent reporting fills gaps in the primary record.
The failure-mode library requires a public source and an arguable mapping to a skipped letter. Anonymous stories may inform the prose, but they do not enter the library as evidence. Crosswalks to DORA, NIST, OWASP, the EU AI Act, and other bodies are BROCS interpretations, not endorsements by those bodies.
Independence
The manifesto discloses the creator's commercial affiliation. Vendors do not pay for inclusion, placement, scoring, or comparison. Commercial and homegrown systems face the same questions.
Versioning and corrections
Changes to the framework receive a version and a dated changelog entry. Editorial, accessibility, and site changes do not. Citations should include the version so a reader can recover the framework that was used.
Corrections and proposed changes are public in the BROCS repository. A useful challenge includes the claim or boundary in question, a concrete counterexample, and a source when the dispute is factual.
The framework text is CC BY 4.0. Reuse requires attribution and an indication of changes.