Most organisations have policies, systems and audit trails. Fewer can answer a harder question: if an important scientific, regulatory or operational claim were challenged tomorrow, could you show exactly how it was produced?
We have published Can You Prove It? A Provenance Readiness Check — a free, twenty-question self-assessment designed to help you find out. It is not a regulatory audit, a certification or legal advice, and it is not a test you pass or fail. It is designed to show you where your evidence chain is strong and where it becomes fragile.
The check asks you to pick one real, consequential result — a regulatory submission, a batch release decision, a published finding, a genomic interpretation — and answer every question about that specific artefact, not about your organisation in general. Answered in the abstract, these questions produce a comfortable score and nothing useful. Answered about one real artefact, they produce a map of where that artefact’s history actually lives, and usually a few surprises.
Twenty questions are grouped into five sections of four, each scoring out of 8:
Your five section scores, and the shape they form, tell you more than the total out of 40.
The most common pattern we see is strength within individual systems that stops at the system boundary — well-governed environments with excellent internal audit trails that cannot be reconnected to a result once it leaves. That single gap is the most commonly missed control in otherwise well-run regulated organisations, and it is exactly the problem our work on evidence governance addresses.
The check’s structure maps directly onto the nine questions a mature evidence chain should be able to answer — the same nine that structure our Minimum Evidence Record. If your results point to a specific gap, that is where to go next. And if you would find an outside view useful, The BioChain Advisory runs a Data Integrity Audit that maps the gaps properly before you commit budget — it does not require any intention to deploy The BioChain.
No. It is a general self-assessment tool. A high score does not establish compliance with any legal or regulatory framework, and scores are not comparable between organisations.
Answered in the abstract, these questions produce a comfortable score and nothing useful. Answered about one real artefact, they produce a map of where that artefact’s history actually lives.
Strong controls within individual systems that do not survive the system boundary — an excellent internal audit trail that cannot be reconnected to a result once it has left the environment that produced it.
Pick the single lowest-scoring section and one question within it rather than attempting everything at once — provenance work succeeds when one boundary is closed at a time. Question 8, on downstream dependency, is worth treating as its own piece of work regardless of your total.
If your organisation generates, manages, analyses or governs biological evidence and would be interested in participating in a UK or European provenance demonstrator, The BioChain would welcome the conversation.
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