Most DPI pilots don’t fail at launch — they fail at scale

A working demo is the easy part. What separates a use case that becomes real shared infrastructure from one that stays a slide deck is almost never the technology. It’s five habits, applied consistently, before anyone calls something “done.”

1. Name the authoritative source before you build anything

If two agencies both think they own a fact — an address, a business license, a diagnosis — the integration will corrupt data quietly for years before anyone notices. Every use case in Mosaic’s catalogue states who owns implementation today for exactly this reason: it’s the first thing to get explicit agreement on, not the last.

2. Design the minimum data, not the maximum convenience

The easiest system to build asks for everything up front. The one that survives a privacy audit and a regulator’s scrutiny asks for the smallest fact that answers the actual question — “is this person over 18,” not their date of birth; “is this credential valid,” not the full record behind it. Retrofitting minimisation after launch is far harder than designing for it first.

3. Publish the pilot’s evidence even when it didn’t work

A pilot that quietly disappears when it underperforms teaches the next implementer nothing and gets repeated at full cost somewhere else next year. Mosaic’s whole model — see how we work — is built around publishing what was learned regardless of outcome, because the failed approaches are often more useful to the next team than the successful ones.

4. Separate the standard from the implementation

A standard should be implementable by more than one vendor, in more than one country’s legal context, without a single company controlling access to it. If only one implementation can ever exist, it isn’t a shared standard — it’s a product with a public-sounding name.

5. Plan the exit before the entry

Every institution that adopts a shared capability should be able to leave it — export its data, run its own instance, or switch providers — without losing interoperability. A standard that only works while everyone stays locked in isn’t infrastructure; it’s a walled garden with a better story.

Where this comes from

This framework isn’t theory — it’s the pattern behind the pain points and open questions already documented on Mosaic’s use-case pages. It will keep changing as more pilots publish evidence. If you’ve run into a sixth habit we’re missing, tell us.