Deciding
Whether to open anything
Everything before this point is handling data. From here it is an enquiry about a person.
The Threshold for Opening Anything
The decision to look into a named person is the point at which a programme starts affecting somebody's life. It deserves a stated threshold and almost never has one.
Who Decides, and Who Should Not
The authority to open an enquiry about a colleague should sit somewhere specific, and several of the obvious candidates are the wrong ones.
The Manager Who Asked for the Check
A request to look into somebody arrives from their own manager. It is sometimes exactly right and sometimes the start of something that should not happen.
Preliminary Review Without Naming It an Investigation
A short, bounded check that resolves most alerts before anybody becomes a subject. The step that distinguishes a programme from a machine for generating cases.
When to Do Nothing
Closing an alert without acting is a legitimate and underused outcome. The cases where it is right, and why it feels harder than it is.
Conflicts of Interest at the Decision Point
The people best placed to assess an insider matter are frequently the people least able to assess it impartially, and in smaller organisations that is unavoidable.
Recording the Decision Not to Proceed
The majority of decisions a programme makes are decisions to stop. Almost none of them is written down, which makes the programme unreviewable.