The way business work behaves today, established by reading the work itself rather than accepting its documentation. Distinct from current state, which is the documented description, and from ideal or target state, which are intentions. ZBTOS begins here because current-, ideal- and launch-first framing all hide the enablement requirements a transformation actually depends on.
Where it is used →Producing a record after the fact so that work appears to have had a governed origin. A retrofitted record is not traceability — it satisfies the audit and leaves the operating condition unchanged.
Where it is used →The act of work moving from one GSDPI™ function to the next while remaining governed, owned and evidenced. Transformation value is produced by conversion, not by activity; where conversion breaks, value stops regardless of how much work is in motion.
Where it is used →The seam between two GSDPI™ functions, where work either passes with its conditions satisfied or does not. A gate that cannot refuse work is not a gate.
Where it is used →Work the enterprise can see in a system of record, a report or a ledger. Detection is not legitimacy: detected work may or may not reconcile to a governed origin, and the share that does is the Traceability Ratio™.
Where it is used →A condition that must be true for a strategy to be executable at all — ownership, decision rights, evidence, capacity, entry conditions. Enablement requirements are what current-state and ideal-state planning most reliably omit.
Where it is used →A dated, attributable record that a state exists, produced by the work rather than assembled to describe it. A claim is worth what its evidence can defend, and no more.
Where it is used →A specific, recorded entry decision made by someone with the authority to make it, satisfying a defined condition, recorded before the work began. Work that cannot be reconciled to one is origin-risk.
Where it is used →Get. Sort. Do. Prove. Improve.® The five standing operating functions every unit of business work moves through. It reads six ways: vertically through any one of the five standing functions, horizontally as work moves through the lifecycle, across seams, at a node, along an actor or function swimlane, and at the macro level across the whole system.
Where it is used →Work drawing real capacity that the operating model never admitted and the forecast never priced. It appears as origin-risk in a traceability read and as unexplained capacity consumption everywhere else.
Where it is used →What must become true, held by the executives accountable for it. A mandate stated as a deliverable cannot be tested; a mandate stated as a required condition can.
Where it is used →The condition of work that exists downstream but cannot be reconciled to a governed entry. Not automatically failure, and not automatically fraud — it is unexplained admission, and until it is resolved it should be read as exposure rather than as legitimate work.
Where it is used →A state that must hold for the mandate to be achievable, distinguished from the solution someone has chosen to achieve it. Required conditions have owners; solutions have plans.
Where it is used →The join between functions, teams or systems where work changes hands. Most conversion breaks live at seams rather than inside any one function, which is why reading a single department rarely finds them.
Where it is used →The proof principle underneath ZBTOS: that a unit of work can be followed from a governed origin to its current or final state without relying on recollection. Traceability is a control property, not a reporting feature.
Where it is used →The share of detected work exposure that reconciles to a governed origin — traceable conversions over traceable conversions plus unresolved origin-risk. It measures whether the work behind a number can be followed at all, which is a precondition for any defensible baseline.
Where it is used →The operating rhythm that keeps required state, work, evidence and value reconciled after a capability is in place. Adopted internally, or operated by ETEGY as a managed service.
Where it is used →The thing being read — a contract, a requisition, a hire, an order, a change. Not a department, a system or a project. ZBTOS reads units of work because that is the level at which conversion can actually be followed.
Where it is used →The summed read of GSDPI — every pain, gain and enablement requirement the lifecycle surfaces, aggregated into one statement of what the operating model can and cannot carry. Not a survey and not a status review: it reads what the work says, against what the org chart claims.
Where it is used →The doctrine: establish what must change from actual state rather than from the inherited plan, the documented process or the launch date. ZBT establishes what must change; GSDPI is how the work is read.
Where it is used →