Steering by the indicators: measuring the IVG and IDA in practice

"Governance must keep pace with execution" stays a statement of intent until it's measured. TEAF answers with two global indicators, already introduced briefly across several Knowledge Center articles: the Governance Speed Index (IVG) and the Architecture Debt Index (IDA). This article details how they're calculated, the threshold that defines healthy governance, and what implementing them concretely involves.

IVG: a ratio, not a qualitative score

The Governance Speed Index compares decision speed to execution speed, using delays measured at each step between the Decision and Execution components of the loop. The reference threshold is simple to remember: an IVG equal to or above 1 confirms governance is keeping pace with execution, in line with the collection's central thesis. Below that, governance falls behind what's actually being deployed — and that lag, unmeasured, stays invisible until it becomes costly.

IDA: aggregating untracked gaps

The Architecture Debt Index aggregates, from the Knowledge Graph, untracked gaps between intent and the system's real state — notably the number of components with no associated decision and unresolved dependencies. It draws on data produced by the loop's Observation component. A stable or declining IDA trajectory confirms these gaps are now tracked and addressed; a continuously rising trajectory, concentrated on a particular domain, signals an area of the system slipping outside governance.

A six-step rollout, not an isolated calculation

These two indicators don't plug into an information system with no governance in place: they assume Continuous Governance is already running. Book III describes a six-step sequence — constituting the Architecture Review Board, effectively assigning the five TEAF roles, setting a continuous review cadence, connecting Decision/Execution data for the IVG, aggregating from the Knowledge Graph for the IDA, then setting the board's intervention thresholds (unresolved drift past 30 days, high risk). For an SMB or scale-up under 250 employees, this setup typically takes six to ten weeks; for a mid-size company, three to five months; for a large group, rolling it out across every domain often takes more than a year.

The pitfalls that distort the measurement

The most common is calculating on incomplete data — an IVG without reliable Execution data gives a false sense of speed. The second is the indicator without consequence: an IVG or IDA published but never followed by corrective action becomes dashboard decoration. The third, more insidious, is two-speed governance — an Architecture Review Board active on legacy domains, absent from peripheral ones, which locally recreates the governance gap these indicators are meant to expose.

Two illustrative scenarios

Like the collection's other scenarios, the two examples below are explicitly fictional and pedagogical — they illustrate a measurement method, not a real client outcome. At "Nélia," a fictional fintech scale-up that grew from 60 to 220 employees in eighteen months, the first calculation shows an IVG of 0.6: governance had fallen behind execution for months. Nine months after the board is constituted, the IVG climbs back to 0.95 thanks to delegating minor decisions to Capability Owners. At "Ondalis Santé," a fictional hospital group of 2,100 employees, the first IDA calculation reveals an unexpected concentration of untracked gaps in the admissions system, inherited from an earlier merger between two facilities — an area nobody had flagged as a priority before the indicator surfaced it.

Where to start

Calculating the IVG and IDA across an entire information system from day one is neither realistic nor recommended. TEAF Light's 1-1-1 principle lets you calculate these two indicators for the first time on a narrow scope, before extending the approach. The online maturity diagnostic helps position an organization even before that first calculation.

• The IVG compares decision speed to execution speed; an IVG ≥ 1 confirms governance keeping pace with reality.
• The IDA aggregates, from the Knowledge Graph, untracked gaps between intent and the real system — a declining trajectory is the signal to look for.
• Rolling them out follows six concrete steps and takes anywhere from six weeks (SMB) to over a year (large group), depending on organization size.
• The main pitfall isn't the calculation itself, but an indicator published that never triggers corrective action.