This case follows our existing public-case verification process, not a new demonstration format. It is an independent teaching simulation built from an official public EY source. It is not real correspondence and does not represent real client results. Nothing here implies that EY used, reviewed, endorsed, sponsored, certified, or commissioned Minerva Advisor.

The situation: after a series of acquisitions, a gaming company's studios operated with conflicting data authority, uneven maturity, and different collection, storage, and evaluation practices. The Group Chief Operating Officer had to decide whether to mandate centralized data control immediately, or first define a small set of shared responsibilities with clear, reversible autonomy boundaries for the studios.

Before any recommendation, the run left a five-item work receipt. First, a single public source was reviewed. Second, four decision roles were identified. Third, six known facts were separated from two inferences and three unresolved unknowns. Fourth, two actionable paths were compared side by side. Fifth, three alternative explanations and one reversal condition were retained for the record.

Known facts: conflicting data accountability and objectives across studios, inefficiency from parallel processes, and clear demands from studio leaders to preserve independence and business continuity. Unknowns: which differences are truly necessary, each studio's maturity and dependencies, and whether the conflict is rooted mainly in organization, technology, resources, or a lack of shared principles. The system never treated these unknowns as settled facts.

The strongest challenge came from the advisor Evelyn, who asked whether starting small underestimates how much the inefficiency is already hurting innovation, and whether unresolved root causes could be used to delay standardization indefinitely. The reversal condition: if evidence shows that fragmentation-driven inefficiency, not authority conflict, is the primary driver, the recommendation shifts toward faster centralization rather than waiting for a full diagnosis.

EY's later-published answer, including the two-layer enterprise-and-studio governance model, the shared data catalog and cloud telemetry platform, the enterprise Chief Data Officer role, cross-functional squads, the change management roadmap, and the resulting efficiency and retention gains, was fully excluded from the input. Minerva reached its judgment without any knowledge of that official outcome.

Three advisors cross-checked the same judgment. Marcus defined the actual boundary of shared responsibility. Sofia modeled the consequences for group operations, the studios, and the data risk team. Evelyn pressed on whether the incremental approach moves fast enough. All three converged on starting from a small, reversible scope, provided the diagnostic process and expansion thresholds stayed verifiable.

The Group Chief Operating Officer added one condition: first verify which inefficiencies truly stem from a lack of shared principles, and document reversible autonomy boundaries with explicit expansion thresholds. The system recorded this input, tested it against the existing judgment, and confirmed the recommendation held. Executive input reinforced the reversal condition without converting any unknown into a fact.

Comparing the two options: immediate full centralization would quickly unify ownership and evaluation methods, but risks disrupting active development, launches, and live services, and could push conflicts to a higher organizational level. Defining shared responsibilities first lowers disruption risk and preserves flexibility, at the cost of near-term coordination overhead. This comparison shows directly whether the executive's added condition changes the underlying judgment, and here it did not.

The committed action: within two weeks, the data governance team will identify which data definitions and decisions genuinely require cross-studio sharing, build a minimal shared-responsibility list with explicit stop conditions, and leave all remaining decisions to studio autonomy. Minerva tracks this next step; it does not claim the governance outcome has already been achieved.

This run used four model calls. It delivered the first decision in 17.489 seconds and completed in 24.701 seconds, passing both the 30-second first-decision threshold and the 45-second complete-result threshold. All ten out of ten decision-quality checks passed. This remains a single live-case validation, not a production-level service guarantee or a real customer outcome.