Enterprise Inventory Management Best Practices

Overview

Enterprise inventories exist to support decision-making. An inventory that is maintained but not actively used in decision processes is an inventory whose value is not being realized. Organizations that invest in building and maintaining inventories but continue to make decisions based on informal knowledge, spreadsheets, and institutional memory are not capturing the return on their inventory investment. The quality of organizational decisions is ultimately constrained by the quality and use of organizational intelligence — and enterprise inventories are the foundation of that intelligence.

Best Practice

Actively integrate enterprise inventory data into organizational decision processes. Require that significant decisions — architecture decisions, vendor selection decisions, regulatory compliance assessments, risk management decisions, strategic planning decisions — reference relevant inventory data as evidence. Track which inventories are being used in which decision processes and identify the inventories whose absence is creating decision-making gaps. Make the reduction of organizational blind spots a stated objective of the enterprise inventory management program.

Benefit(s)

Actively using inventory data in decision processes produces better decisions and creates a virtuous cycle: better decisions motivate investment in better inventories, which produce better decisions. Organizational blind spots are systematically eliminated as inventory coverage improves and inventory data is integrated into more decision processes. The Enterprise Model becomes a living, actively used organizational intelligence asset rather than a governance artifact maintained for its own sake.