Enterprise Inventory Management Best Practices

Overview

Individual inventories are valuable. A well-maintained Systems and Applications Inventory tells you what systems you run. A well-maintained Vendors and Suppliers Inventory tells you who you depend on. A well-maintained Risks and Issues Inventory tells you what threatens you. But each of these alone provides only a partial view of the enterprise. The real intelligence emerges when the inventories are connected — when you can trace a risk to the system that creates it, trace that system to the vendor that supports it, trace that vendor to the contract that governs the relationship, and trace that contract to the regulatory obligation it fulfills.

Design and maintain enterprise inventories with the Enterprise Model as the explicit goal. Every inventory decision — what attributes to capture, what identifier scheme to use, what relationships to record — should be made in the context of how that inventory will connect to other inventories. Treat the Enterprise Model as the target architecture and each inventory as a component of that architecture, not as an isolated collection.

Assign accountability for the Enterprise Model as a whole to a function with enterprise-wide scope — typically Enterprise Architecture. Individual inventories have individual owners. The Enterprise Model has a steward accountable for its overall coherence, completeness, and connectivity.

Benefit(s)

Organizations that build toward the Enterprise Model gain analytical capabilities that isolated inventories cannot provide. Impact analysis becomes possible — if a vendor is acquired, what systems are affected? If a regulation changes, what processes and data assets are implicated? If a system is retired, what services and integrations will break? These questions are only answerable when inventories are connected. The Enterprise Model transforms the organization’s self-knowledge from fragmented and siloed to integrated and queryable.