The Whare Framework is an ex-ante (before implementation) appraisal framework for heritage-digitisation partnerships in Aotearoa NZ.
What this is
The framework is a derivative of Moore’s Strategic Triangle, Sir Mason Durie’s Te Whare Tapa Wha, and Māori data-sovereignty principles alongside miscellaneous sector-specific resources to provide a unique perspective on information handling and digitisation of records in the unique community landscape of Aotearoa.
As archives and cultural institutions increasingly partner with private organisations to digitise heritage collections, traditional appraisal models often struggle to capture what matters most: cultural integrity, community trust, and enduring stewardship. The Whare Framework offers a new approach. Developed by Eric Tey, this original ex-ante appraisal framework combines Mark Moore's Strategic Triangle with Sir Mason Durie's Te Whare Tapa Whā model and Māori data sovereignty principles to assess heritage-digitisation partnerships before they are implemented.
Structured around fifteen assessment points, the framework asks whether a proposed partnership creates genuine public value (te kaupapa), has sufficient authority and legitimacy (te mana), and can be sustained over time (te kaha) across five domains, including relationships, cultural wellbeing, institutional capability, and sovereignty. Unlike conventional scorecards, the framework is deliberately non-compensatory: a failure in foundational stewardship and sovereignty (whenua) cannot be offset by strengths elsewhere.
By reframing digitisation partnerships through a distinctly Aotearoa lens, the Whare Framework provides heritage institutions with a practical tool for identifying risks, testing assumptions, and ensuring that decisions made today protect both collections and community trust for future generations.
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Background
I came to business analysis out of healthcare. Years of pharmacy practice leave you with a particular habit of mind: you never assess one thing about a person in isolation. You look at the whole patient, because the number that looks fine tells you very little about the one that doesn't.
When the Archives New Zealand digitisation brief landed, our lecturer pushed the class to think past the obvious answer — previous cohorts, the warning went, had cast the net too narrowly. That licence to go sideways is the only reason what follows exists.
I started where most people start, reading the established public-private partnership literature: value for money, the public sector comparator, critical success factors, balanced scorecards. Solid, well-tested material, built over decades for toll roads and hospitals. The longer I sat with it, the more one word kept catching. Average.
Nearly every one of these frameworks scores a proposed partnership across several dimensions and then combines the result. Strong commercial terms lift a weak governance score. Impressive throughput compensates for thin community benefit. The partnership comes out the other side as a single number, and the number says healthy enough.
That is where the pharmacy instinct objected. A patient with excellent bloods and a failing liver is not eighty per cent well. Some findings are not the kind of thing other findings can make up for — you treat the failing organ, and no amount of good news elsewhere changes that. So I started wondering whether a proposed business partnership has the same property. Whether a deal, like a person, can have one thing wrong with it that the rest of the picture has no authority to offset.
What if we simply refuse to average?
Once that question was on the page, the model to answer it was already in front of me. Te Whare Tapa Whā describes wellbeing as a wharenui: four walls standing on a foundation, where damage to any one dimension leaves the whole house unbalanced. Tā Mason Durie built it in the mid-1980s to describe human health. The structural rule inside it — one wall fails, the whole thing fails — is exactly the rule I had been looking for, and it had been sitting inside New Zealand's health system for my entire working life.
A second gap arrived alongside the first. The imported frameworks handle cultural obligation badly, where they handle it at all. Value for money has no field for the mana of taonga. A balanced scorecard has no perspective for whether the right people authorised the decision. For a national archive holding records that whakapapa runs through, that absence sits at the centre of the question rather than at its edge.
So the framework came to treat a heritage digitisation partnership the way a clinician treats a patient: as a whole, across dimensions that cannot substitute for one another, with the cultural dimension carrying the same weight as the financial one. Moore's public value triangle supplies the three questions. The whare supplies the five domains those questions get asked about. He Ara Waiora supplies the tests on process, and Māori data sovereignty principles supply the tests on authority. Whenua, the foundation, passes or fails rather than scoring — a compromised foundation is a different kind of problem from a thin wall.
It held up better than I expected. Checking the five pou against Simon Tanner's Balanced Value Impact Model — built independently, out of Western cultural economics, for exactly this sector — the domains line up almost one to one. Two traditions arriving at the same categories by different routes was the point where this stopped feeling like a student's clever analogy and started feeling like a finding.
The part I did not anticipate was how much of the pharmacy years came with me. I had been treating that background as something to explain away in a career change. It turned out to be the thing that let me see a gap the procurement literature had walked straight past.