AI for CIOs
What belongs in a company AI source register?
SimplSolutions editorial team · Knowledge governance · 4 min read
Published
AI-assisted original editorial guidance. Calculations and scenarios are illustrative, not customer results.
A folder list is not a source register
Knowing that an assistant reads SharePoint or a shared drive does not tell you whether a particular instruction is current, relevant or permitted for this employee. Start with the business answer the source supports. A remote-access guide may support a setup question. A procurement contract may describe the same supplier but have a different audience and purpose. Their proximity in a folder is not a reason to retrieve both.
Assign each source a stable reference, accountable owner, intended task, authorized audience, applicable locations, approved version and update rule. Include where the authoritative original lives. A convenient copy is not automatically the authoritative source. Ask who can declare the copy superseded and how that change reaches the assistant.
Fill in one real record before designing a large taxonomy
Here is a synthetic record your team can adapt. It contains no employee or supplier information. The point is to make unresolved governance decisions visible rather than creating an impressive inventory with blank accountability fields.
| Field | Example entry |
|---|---|
| Source reference | IT-REMOTE-014 |
| Business purpose | Explain standard remote-network setup |
| Owner | Service-desk procedure owner |
| Audience | Employees using managed laptops |
| Applicability | Corporate offices; excludes acquired-company devices |
| Authoritative version | Owner-approved revision 4 |
| Refresh trigger | Approved revision or access-policy change |
| Conflict rule | Hold and route to procedure owner |
| Source unavailable | Give service-desk contact, not guessed steps |
The example's audience is an applicability description, not a technical access-control implementation. Your system owner still needs to connect authenticated user identity to enforceable permissions and test the result. Keeping those two decisions separate prevents a descriptive spreadsheet from being mistaken for security.
Illustrative editorial photograph, not a customer result.
Separate current, accessible and applicable
A document can be current but inaccessible to a user. It can be accessible but intended for another location. It can be applicable but superseded by a newer approved instruction. Treat all three as distinct checks. Do not infer applicability from a search ranking or infer permission from a source owner's desire to make answers convenient.
Test a question for the excluded acquired-company device. The appropriate answer should identify the missing applicability and route the employee to the right owner, not apply the corporate procedure because it looks similar. Then test a user outside the permitted audience. The refusal must not expose the restricted source in its explanation.
Make source retirement part of the register
When a source is replaced, identify derived chunks, cached answers and saved drafts that may still contain it. Record what the implementation actually removes or invalidates and what requires human review. A file disappearing from the original drive does not independently prove every derived copy has disappeared.
Set an owner for routine review and exception handling. An update schedule should reflect how the source changes, not a universal thirty-day rule. A frequently changing procedure needs a different refresh arrangement from a stable reference. If the owner is unknown, mark the source pending instead of pretending a date makes it trustworthy.
Use the register as a release input
Before connecting a new source, inspect a permitted answer, a denied question, a location mismatch and a superseded version. Save expected results and actual evidence. Link failures back to the source record so the owner can decide whether to revise, remove or narrow it. This makes the register an operating tool rather than a one-time project attachment.
Download the Company AI Source Register and complete five important sources with their owners. OWASP's RAG security guidance discusses source provenance and access inheritance; a register alone does not implement those controls. Request a source-grounded demo when you have one approved guide and a named audience. SimplSolutions can scope the knowledge foundation and required verification around that task.
Put this to work this week
Ask the owner of your most-used guide to complete the example record. If the audience, effective version or conflict rule is unknown, leave the source pending and assign a resolution owner. Test a question that depends on one of those fields. Record whether the assistant clarifies or guesses. Then use the controlled-update exercise to check what happens after the owner changes the guide.
