Integrated Value Architecture · Research portal
Everything is context.
Governance is the interface.
AI can carry more of the organization than any person can. IVA gives people a way to govern that context without forcing every form of value through finance—or throwing away what has not become useful yet.
FIELD NOTE / 001
Trash was the name humans gave to context they lacked the capacity to preserve and interpret.
Integrated Value Architecture (IVA) is a five-ledger organizational governance and decision architecture for the AI era. It gives Financial, Operational, Capacity, Learning and Innovation, and Externalities and Equity value independent standing while preserving the larger context connecting them.
Financial records, approved plans, policies, and organization charts are not everything the organization knows. They are the information that survived existing limits of attention, format, authority, and storage. AI changes the carrying cost of context. The architecture must change with it.
Follow the full argumentThe architecture
Retain the field.
Govern the consequence.
IVA separates five questions that conventional systems routinely collapse: what exists, what counts, who can decide, what the organization can sustain, and who carries the consequence.
Total preservation
Information is not discarded merely because its future analytical value cannot be predicted.
→02Independent standing
Financial, operational, capacity, learning, and external positions remain visible on their own terms.
→03Structural recognition
Persistent, material, verifiable conditions become governable records rather than background noise.
→04Legitimate movement
Evidence, authority, capacity, funding, obligation, and accountability determine whether action can survive.
→Research map
Start with the question.
The portal is organized around canonical answers, not a pile of disconnected articles. Each route owns a concept, links to its source record, and connects the reader to the next governing question.
What is Integrated Value Architecture?
The five-ledger governance framework, its layers, and the problem it is built to solve.
Open the framework →ArchitectureWhy five independent ledgers?
How unlike forms of organizational value remain visible without forced conversion or consolidation.
Study the ledgers →Structural failureWhat is Internal Governance Monopoly?
Why one overloaded internal lane can control value, evidence, resources, reporting, and legitimate action.
Read the definition →RecognitionWhat is structural accounting?
How persistent nonfinancial conditions become evidence-backed assets and liabilities in their native domains.
Open the method →Human-AI governanceHow does AI change organizational memory?
Why the carrying cost of context changes the definition of information organizations once treated as trash.
Follow the thesis →Defined termsWhat does each IVA term mean?
A canonical glossary for the architecture, structural accounting, failure patterns, and applied instruments.
Use the glossary →The human-readable projection
Five ledgers.
No forced conversion.
The ledgers are not five storage bins and they are not how AI understands the organization. They are how humans govern an information field larger than they can hold.
Study the five-ledger model →Financial
Money, assets, liabilities, revenue, cost, restrictions, and financial obligations.
↗02SVUoOperational
Reliability, flow, quality, continuity, handoffs, backlog, and service performance.
↗03SVUcCapacity
Labor, time, attention, infrastructure, redundancy, resilience, and sustainable load.
↗04SVUlLearning + innovation
Adaptation, experimentation, institutional memory, transfer, and controlled change.
↗05SVUeExternalities + equity
Stakeholder consequence, access, burden, legitimacy, environment, and obligation.
↗Non-consolidation doctrine: a gain in one domain does not erase a loss in another.
The public standard
Architecture that can be inspected, cited, and tested.
The IVA Governance Architecture Standard v1.1 defines the minimum public requirements for five independent ledgers, recognition, non-consolidation, Structural Value Units, registers, reporting, roles, conformance, and certification boundaries.
- Five independent value domains
- Recognition and evidence requirements
- Structural events and registers
- Nonfinancial, nonconvertible SVUs
- Conformance and misstatement concepts
- Micro-entity implementation tier
Public doctrine does not expose protected calibration, scoring, diagnostic, audit, or implementation methods.
Working papers
The architecture has a public record.
Published work develops the theory outside sales language, creates a citable trail, and makes the framework available for serious criticism, extension, and use.
Internal Governance Monopoly
A working concept for structural failure when one internal domain gains disproportionate authority over value, evidence, resources, and legitimate action.
DOI 10.2139/ssrn.6444178 ↗IVA Working Paper 001 · 2026Beyond Financial Dominance
A multi-ledger architecture that gives financial, operational, capacity, learning, and external value independent standing.
DOI 10.2139/ssrn.6050034 ↗Research indexPublications, sources, citations, and open questions.
Open the research record →You are here
Research + standard
The canonical concepts, public doctrine, working papers, comparisons, citation guidance, and research agenda.
Explore the architecture →Put it to work
Applied IVA
Decision readiness, strategic planning, performance management, Value-Based Objectives™, and Rule 52 AI-use readiness.
Go to IVA Decision Architecture ↗Founder + research lead
Evan Foster
IVA was developed at the intersection of public administration, organizational governance, finance, operations, policy implementation, and the practical problem of getting complex decisions to survive contact with real institutions.
Follow the work
Build from the whole record.
Get practical notes on decision architecture, performance, AI use, and the research developing behind IVA.
Join the IVA Decision Brief