Applications Inventory and Attributes

The Application is one of the many recognized Noun Types in the IF4IT Enterprise Inventory Management taxonomy — the master catalog of every class of enterprise asset, relationship, and organizational construct the enterprise inventories and governs. Each Noun Type has its own inventory, and each inventory contributes its records and relationships to the Enterprise Model that connects them all. The full catalog of recognized Noun Types, the principles that govern inventory design and federation, and the Inventory of Inventories are documented in the IF4IT Enterprise Inventory Management Best Practices document.

Within that taxonomy, the Applications Inventory sits closest to seven neighboring Noun Types:

• Capabilities — an application supports and realizes one or more business capabilities, and a capability is in turn supported by the applications that deliver it (bidirectional).

• Technologies — an application is built on and uses technologies, and each application’s Technology Profile seeds the Technologies Inventory with the technologies in use.

• Integrations — an application is the source or target of integrations, and the Integrations Inventory in turn derives the application’s Integration Summary.

• IT Operating Environments — an application runs in, and is deployed to, one or more governed IT operating environments.

• Vendors — an application is supplied or licensed by a vendor that is accountable for its delivery and support.

• People — an application is owned by, and has subject-matter experts drawn from, the people governed in the People Inventory.

• Data and Information — an application processes, manages, and stores data and information entities, which are in turn processed or mastered by the applications that act on them; this relationship also carries the sensitivity and classification of that data, governed through this inventory’s Security and Data and Information attributes.

Where a neighboring inventory is published, refer to its IF4IT inventory document for the full governance model; where it is not yet published, the relationship is defined in the IF4IT Enterprise Inventory Management Best Practices document.

The Application should not be confused with adjacent Noun Types. A System is a broader collection of applications, data stores, and infrastructure that together deliver a complex capability; it is understood through the relationships among application records, not as a single application record. A Module, Component, or Library is a constituent part of an application rather than an application in its own right, and is governed as its own Noun Type. A Technology is what an application is built on — a language, framework, platform, or product — not the application itself. Keeping these boundaries firm is what lets the Applications Inventory stay a clean, governable collection of discrete applications.