A representative finding from current engagements: human identity governance at Stage 4 — central IAM, MFA, lifecycle managed — and agent governance at Stage 1, with agents recently inventoried but still authenticating via long-lived API keys against shared service accounts, without their own audit trail. The combined average would read Stage 2 to 3 and look acceptable. The separate reporting reveals that the unmanaged half is precisely the identity class with the largest and least predictable scope of action. That visibility is what triggers the prioritized roadmap action; an aggregated score buries it.
The named-accountable-owner test
If I run only one diagnostic in a new engagement, this is the one. For every production agent-based system in the environment, ask: who, by name, is accountable if this agent causes harm? An agent without a named accountable owner is the non-human counterpart of the workstation everyone uses, and no one owns. Stage 5 of the model formally requires a named accountable owner per deployed agent. The reason is operational, not bureaucratic: the question ‘who is responsible for this system?’ must be answered before the incident, not during it.
In practice, that accountability binds best to the role that already carries the operational risk of the affected process — typically the asset owner in the business function. Anchoring it there prevents agent-based systems from drifting into the organizational gray zone between IT, security and the business, which is exactly where unattributed action originates.
