Use Cases

From diagnosis to portfolio: how transformation is prioritized

Introduction · The Thesis

Diagnostic models answer where the organization stands; survey instruments answer what its real terrain looks like. A third question remains — the one that turns diagnosis into motion: what do we do first?

That question has a bad traditional answer — the list of initiatives assembled by intuition, where the manager’s pet project, the demo that dazzled at a trade show, and IT’s perennial backlog item all live side by side. And it has a disciplined answer: a use case portfolio — a structured catalog where every case is classified by required maturity level, by impact beneficiary, and by business domain, so that prioritization becomes an explicit strategic decision rather than an accumulation of whims.

This chapter defines the pieces of that portfolio: the distinction between use cases and value solutions, the three classification dimensions, the Citizen / City / DUAL prioritization framework with its two canonical strategies, and the discipline of honesty about ROI. It closes with a real portfolio — one hundred cases for local government — that shows the whole system in operation.

Use Cases and Value Solutions

The portfolio’s first distinction is one of granularity, and separating the two pieces avoids a mistake that ruins entire catalogs: confusing the brick with the building.

A Use Case (UC) is the atomic block: a specific, bounded, reusable capability. “Anomaly detection in expenditures,” “24/7 customer-service chatbot,” “automatic claim classification.” A UC is described by what it does, why AI does it better than the traditional alternative, and what maturity it demands of the organization. Its value lies in reuse: the same UC can take part in several different solutions.

A Value Solution (VS) is the strategic configuration: a set of integrated UCs that, together, solve a complete business problem and present themselves to a decision-maker as a unit with its own value proposition — problem, solution, metrics, return. “Autonomous financial management” is not a UC: it is a VS that integrates end-to-end budget management, financial analysis, continuous forecasting, and the automatic reallocation of budget lines.

The relationship is one of composition, not exclusive hierarchy: a UC can be sold on its own (modular sale, when the client wants a specific capability) or as a component of a VS (integral sale, when they want the turnkey solution). A healthy portfolio keeps both catalogs alive and linked — every UC declares which VSs it takes part in; every VS lists the UCs it integrates.

The Three Classification Dimensions

Every case in the portfolio is classified along three orthogonal dimensions. Together, the three turn a flat list into an instrument of decision.

Dimension 1 · Required maturity level

Every UC demands a minimum level of organizational maturity to operate — the MOTOR level of the organization able to execute it (and, depending on the case, the IRIS stage its information component presupposes). A chatbot running on masked data is executable at the early levels; an agent managing a budget with organizational authority demands the high levels; an inter-organizational network of agents, the highest level of all.

This dimension is what anchors the portfolio to the diagnosis: the case’s level is crossed against the organization’s level. Cases at the current level are executable today — that is where the quick wins live. Cases one level above are the reachable frontier — the sweet spot where ambition pulls maturity forward without breaking it. (This sweet spot is local to the portfolio — your current level plus one — distinct from the market Sweet Spot that MOTOR places at Level 4.) Cases several levels above are long-range vision: valuable for showing the destination, dangerous as an immediate commitment.

Dimension 2 · Impact beneficiary (Citizen / City / DUAL)

The second dimension classifies by who perceives the benefit — and it gets its own section below, because it is the political heart of the portfolio.

Dimension 3 · Business domain

The third dimension segments by the business’s thematic area — external customer service, internal management and finance, operations and infrastructure, specialized services. Its function is practical: when the decision-maker has a focus (“my problem is security,” “my crisis is financial”), the portfolio must be filterable by domain in seconds and present the complete relevant offer — the domain’s UCs, the VSs that integrate them, and the path of scale.

The Citizen / City / DUAL Framework

Any organization that simultaneously serves an external audience (the beneficiary of the service) and an internal audience (the operator) lives under double pressure: the external audience demands better service; the internal one demands operational efficiency. A use case may benefit one, the other, or both.

The framework classifies each case by who perceives the direct benefit:

The framework was born in local government — hence its names — but the structure is generic: in retail banking, CITIZEN is the customer and CITY is compliance and operations; in healthcare, the patient and the clinical teams; in telecommunications, the subscriber and network operations. In every case the logic is the same: the organization holds two simultaneous relationships that can align or pull against each other, and the transformation can prioritize the external side, the internal one, or the crossing point.

Why it cuts across IRIS and MOTOR: the framework does not classify by transformation axis (knowing/doing) but by impact beneficiary. A CITIZEN case can belong to the KNOWING axis (the customer queries their case in natural language) or to the DOING axis (an agent serves them 24/7). That is why the framework lives at the AURA level: a complete diagnosis assesses IRIS position, MOTOR position, and the Citizen/City/DUAL priority mix for the roadmap.

The two canonical strategies

When the roadmap is assembled, the framework translates into two archetypal strategies with distinct investment and return profiles.

Strategy A · Citizen-First. Prioritize cases visible to the external audience to win support, legitimacy, and momentum. It applies when leadership is under pressure from external stakeholders, when public trust is low and must be rebuilt, or when the political cost of not acting exceeds the financial cost of acting. Its pool is the CITIZEN cases plus the DUALs. Its risk: lower or diffuse financial ROI — legitimacy is gained without necessarily cutting operational cost.

Strategy B · City-First. Prioritize internal efficiency, savings, and compliance before exposing anything to the external audience. It applies in fiscal crisis, with overloaded teams that need relief before any expansion of service, or when the urgency is regulatory. Its pool is the CITY cases plus the DUALs. Its risk: the external audience perceives no benefit — the organization improves but fails to capitalize on it.

The common core — the DUAL cases. They appear in both strategies and are the optimal intersection: the external audience perceives them, the organization quantifies them, and against any critic they are defensible. Building the roadmap with maximum priority on DUAL cases is the lowest-friction play — and designing cases so that they are DUAL from conception is discipline, not luck.

Three usage notes close the framework. First: do not force a strategy — a large organization with budget can combine both; one in fiscal crisis probably needs pure City-First for the first year; the strategy is chosen by context, not by ideology. Second: DUAL cases are the portfolio’s most expensive currency — they are scarce, and they are designed. Third: the framework does not replace the diagnosis — applying Citizen-First without having solved AI governance (the step from MOTOR Level 1 to 2) is building visibility on sand; the framework prioritizes what to attack first within each level; it does not substitute for the maturity trajectory.

The ROI Discipline

A portfolio loses its usefulness the day the decision-maker stops believing it. And the fastest way to lose credibility is to present estimated returns as if they were measured.

The discipline has three rules. First: every estimated ROI is declared referential — visibly, without shame and without a hidden asterisk — until a validated baseline exists. Second: social value is kept separate from financial return. There are cases whose dominant benefit is intangible — school dropout detected in time, heritage preserved, public health under watch — and forcing them into a savings figure denatures them; the portfolio flags them as social value cases and defends them on those terms. Third: the baseline is validated before any return is declared — an independent baseline validation protocol is part of the portfolio, not a luxury added later.

To this is added the catalog’s formal quality: consistent terminology, descriptions that distinguish what the case does from why AI does it better, and complete cross-references between UCs and VSs. A portfolio of one hundred cases is an editorial product — and it is governed as one, with its own quality framework and systematic reviews.

A Real Portfolio: One Hundred Cases for Local Government

The complete system — UC/VS, three dimensions, prioritization framework — is best illustrated by the portfolio where it was born: the agentive transformation inventory for municipal government, developed by ultraBASE over the course of 2025.

The scale: 100 atomic use cases and 30 value solutions, with an estimated (referential) aggregate return on the order of USD 118M/year for the whole, distributed across four business domains: citizen services and communication (17%), internal management — legal, HR, finance, procurement, and budget — (37%), infrastructure, roads, security, and emergencies (24%), and services — health, education, culture, sports, and environment — (22%).

The distribution by maturity tells the story of the complete transformation:

The pyramid speaks for itself: a third of the portfolio is executable at the early maturity levels — that is where momentum is built — while the tip describes a horizon where agents from different organizations cooperate in a network. And the distribution by beneficiary came out reasonably balanced — 31 CITIZEN, 38 CITY, 31 DUAL — which allows both canonical strategies to be served from the same catalog.

The flagship solutions display the composition pattern. The portfolio’s top-ranked VS, Autonomous Municipal Financial Management — a level-6 solution — integrates four UCs, among them the agent that manages the entire budget (level 6) and the one that reallocates budget lines automatically (level 6), supported by financial analysis and forecasting capabilities from earlier levels. The second, Paperless Municipality — a level-3 solution — integrates five UCs for the full digitalization of the procedures the citizen actually perceives. That #1 is level 6 and #2 is level 3 is no contradiction: it is the portfolio doing its job — showing at once the ambition of the destination and the executable step of tomorrow.

What the case teaches transcends the public sector. First, that a portfolio is curated: this one went through seven version iterations and nearly five hundred quality improvements before being considered presentable. Second, that the classification dimensions are earned by iterating with the real decision-maker — the thematic area was born from a concrete commercial segmentation need, not from a desk exercise. Third, that the honesty of the referential ROI did not weaken the portfolio: it made it defensible.

How to use this framework?

1. Diagnose first. IRIS position, MOTOR position. Without this, the portfolio has no anchor.
2. Inventory along the three dimensions. Every candidate case is classified by required level, beneficiary, and domain. What cannot be classified is not sufficiently defined.
3. Separate UCs from VSs. The atomic blocks in one catalog; the strategic configurations in another; the cross-references, complete.
4. Choose strategy by context. Citizen-First, City-First, or mixed — an explicit leadership decision, revisable, with the DUAL cases always at the front.
5. Attack the current level + 1. Quick wins at the present level for momentum; the sweet spot one level up for traction; the rest of the portfolio as a declared horizon.
6. Declare ROI honestly. Referential until the baseline is validated; social value on its own terms.

The portfolio is the instrument that closes the AURA path: the vision defines the destination, IRIS and MOTOR locate the organization, Data Canon and Wingmap prepare the terrain — and the portfolio decides, with discipline, the next step.