Decision Telemetry Architecture: A Universal Contract for Analytics-Ready Systems.

Modern analytics systems operate in a fundamentally reactive

mode: they reconstruct decisions after the fact from logs,

events, and partial artifacts. This creates fragile pipelines,

high investigation cost, and limited explainability in domains

such as fraud detection, compliance, and AI-driven systems.

While data contracts have improved structural stability, they

address schema integrity rather than semantic intent. This

paper argues that decisions themselves must become first-class

architectural objects.

We introduce the concept of decision contracts: a standardized

runtime representation of outcomes, evidence, and lineage that

is emitted at the moment a decision occurs. Decision contracts

allow analytics systems to consume intent directly rather than

infer it indirectly. We propose a three-stage analytics maturity

model - reactive cleanup, structural contracts, and intentional

decision instrumentation - and describe an architecture pattern

intended to enable analytics-ready systems by design. A

reference implementation demonstrates the practicality of this

approach and suggests a path toward a universal decision

telemetry standard.