How CTI reaches a conclusion.

The Commercial Transformation Index methodology turns commercial signals into a structured view of capability, relationships and maturity across ten connected domains. Signals are gathered and classified by how they are known, read against a consistent evaluation structure, resolved into domain capability and the dependencies between domains, and expressed as a commercial maturity state with the evidence behind each finding still attached.

A CTI signal is a single piece of commercial evidence or context about one organisation: something observable from outside, something reported by the people who operate a system, something established from that organisation records, or a condition in its market. A signal on its own establishes very little. Its value comes from being read alongside many others.

A CTI criterion is a structured question the methodology asks of every organisation it assesses, which is what makes two assessments comparable. The Full CTI Audit applies its criteria consistently across the ten commercial domains. Their number and wording, and how each one resolves, remain proprietary.

Signals provide evidence and context; criteria provide a consistent evaluation structure. Many signals inform a single criterion, and signal depth varies considerably between domains because some commercial systems are far more observable than others. Criteria alone would produce a questionnaire; signals alone would produce observations without a comparable structure to read them against.

Four classes. Observed evidence is gathered directly from what is externally visible. Self-reported evidence is described by the people who operate a system. Validated CTI evidence has been reviewed against supporting material in a Full CTI Audit. Source-specific evidence comes from external market and sector sources and describes conditions rather than the organisation. Every finding carries the class it rests on.

CTI assesses two kinds of relationship. A primary dependency is structural: one domain cannot do its job properly without what another produces. A secondary influence is commercial: one domain changes the value another can create without feeding it directly. Both are assessed in their own right rather than inferred by comparing two domain readings, which is what lets a result say which weakness is holding the others in place.

Commercial maturity is expressed as one of six Commercial Maturity Bands, describing how the commercial system operates as a whole rather than grading any single function. The band reflects how deliberately the system is designed, how reliably it repeats without depending on particular individuals, how well its domains inform one another, and how much of it the organisation can evidence.

No. Some commercial domains are highly observable from outside, and others can only be understood from the inside, so the volume and type of evidence available differs considerably between them. The evaluation structure stays constant so results remain comparable, and the evidence class attached to each finding is what tells a reader how much weight it can carry.

Self-reported evidence is used where a system cannot be observed from outside, and any finding resting on it is labelled as self-reported. It is not treated as a weaker finding: it is a finding about what an organisation reports, which is a genuinely different thing from what has been reviewed. An assessment built mainly on self-reported evidence returns an indicative maturity position rather than a validated one.

A gap is recorded as a gap. CTI does not infer a value where it has no evidence, and it does not average around the hole. Missing evidence lowers the confidence attached to the finding, and is frequently a finding in its own right, because a system that cannot evidence a capability is rarely managing it consistently.

By keeping the evidence behind a result visible rather than resolving everything into a single unqualified number. Where evidence is thin, a CTI finding says so and carries lower confidence than one built on reviewed material, and the routes that cannot support a validated score do not produce one. A figure that states what it was built from can be examined by somebody else, which is what makes it usable in a commercial decision.

The methodology carries a version, and any change that alters how a finding should be read is recorded against the version it applies from. Published intelligence states the version it was produced under. This is what keeps historical findings interpretable, because a result can always be read in the context of the method that produced it.

The ten commercial domains, the evidence classes, the six Commercial Maturity Bands, the structured evaluation criteria and 250 point maximum of the Full CTI Audit, the relationship model and the way evidence depth differs between assessment routes are all public. The criterion wording, scoring anchors, weighting, aggregation and confidence calculations remain proprietary, so a CTI result reflects an organisation’s commercial system rather than its familiarity with the scoring model.

They apply the same methodology to different evidence. The Free Website Audit reads externally observable evidence in minutes. The In-Depth Website Audit examines the same territory far more closely, within an hour. The Commercial Maturity Assessment adds self-reported evidence across all ten domains in 20 to 30 minutes and returns an indicative maturity position. The Full CTI Audit works from validated evidence across all ten domains and their relationships, over weeks.

The Full CTI Audit is the only route that covers all ten commercial domains and the relationships between them on evidence reviewed against supporting material. It is the only one that produces a validated CTI Score and Commercial Maturity Band, and the only one that can establish which constraint is limiting the wider system and in what order to address it. The other routes are deliberately faster and narrower.