The Missing Decision Layer: Structural Failure in Information Systems and the Case for a Minimal Governance Kernel

This paper identifies a structural failure in information systems: systems record state changes and operations, but do not record — as a first-class component — the human decisions that authorize them. This absence produces systems that are not deterministically reconstructible and leads to accountability gaps across institutional contexts.

The work presents longitudinal evidence of this failure across multiple domains, including public administration, education systems, and AI-assisted development. It introduces the concept of a minimal governance kernel as the structural response to this condition.

This paper is part of the Janus Governance Project, which defines a minimal, system-level approach to making human–AI workflows traceable, auditable, and reconstructible through explicit decision records, evidence modeling, and append-only governance logs.