Pilot Pattern
The 30-Day SDC Audit
Start owning your data governance without replacing the platform you already run. A procurement-defensible pilot with zero production impact, a board-readable deliverable, and an empirical exit at day 30.
The procurement frame
For an organization locked to a platform it cannot easily leave, the hardest question is where to begin. The answer is not a migration. It is a 30-day audit that runs alongside what you already have and leaves you owning a portable, open-standards record of your own governance.
The most common objection to adopting SDC is not technical and is not pricing. It is the fear of a six-month commitment that ends in a disrupted production system with nothing to show for it.
Both halves of that fear are misplaced. The smallest viable SDC pilot takes 30 days, runs in parallel with production, and produces a deliverable a board can read.
There is no vendor lock-in: sdcgovernance is Apache 2.0 on PyPI and runs anywhere Python runs. There is no data migration: the audit observes the decision flow you already have. There is no system replacement: sdcgovernance runs alongside production, not in it.
What the pilot actually does
Set up the substrate
In SDCStudio, pick a domain library (NIEM, FHIR, NIH CDE, Default), layer the ProvGov components on top, point an agent at one datasource, and get validated SDC4 instances. One to two days for most pilots.
Install sdcgovernance
pip install sdcgovernance. Configure the decision table that mirrors the rules your decision flow already follows.
Observe for 30 days
Every decision in the flow generates a tamper-evident Receipt. Hash-chained. Bound to the SDC instance that produced it. Read-only against your existing system.
Read the corpus
Three questions: complete provenance, gaps, and what would have been refused. You exit with documented governance or with a specific, scoped Phase 2.
Why this works as a pilot
Zero production impact
sdcgovernance runs alongside, not in. Receipts are observational. Nothing the existing system does changes.
Defined exit criteria
At day 30 you have a Receipt corpus. The exit is empirical, not narrative.
Procurement-defensible
No vendor lock-in. No data migration. No system replacement. Apache 2.0 means no paid commitment to Axius SDC to run the pilot.
Auditable artifact
The Receipt corpus is a board-readable deliverable. Hash-chained, structurally consistent, portable.
What you walk away with
Two things, both yours to keep. First, the Receipt corpus: a hash-chained, portable record that answers what your governance actually did over the 30 days, in a form a board or an auditor can read.
Second, the generated app stack. At the end of the on-ramp you download the composed data model, a template SDC4 instance, and an Apache 2.0 app stack scaffolded for the profile you pick: a fully FOSS profile (Apache Jena/Fuseki plus PostgreSQL), an Enterprise profile (Graphwise GraphDB plus SirixDB plus Keycloak), or both. Every later app you generate imports into the original stack, so infrastructure is procured once across the portfolio rather than per pilot.
A 30-day, zero-impact, board-readable pilot
should not be the kind of commitment that is hard to approve.
Prefer to talk it through first? Contact us.