Integrations Inventory and Attributes

The Integrations Inventory is the authoritative enterprise record of every governed data and information integration — every connection through which data or information moves between two entities in the enterprise or between the enterprise and the outside world. Each Noun Instance in this inventory is a single, uniquely identified Integration: a record capturing what connects to what, what moves between them, through which technology, across which environments, with what sensitivity, and under what governance. An Integration is also known as a Data and Information Integration, reflecting that both highly structured data (JSON records, CSV files, database transactions) and unstructured information (PDF documents, images, audio files) flow through governed integrations. Without a governed Integrations Inventory, enterprises are blind to their integration complexity, their data flow risk, and the true cost and effort of retiring or changing any system in their portfolio. The Integrations Inventory is a foundational governance artifact for Application Portfolio Management (APM), Technology Portfolio Management (TPM), and the Enterprise Model. APM uses it to quantify application coupling and dependency exposure — integration count is one of the most reliable leading indicators of application retirement cost and risk. TPM uses it to identify which integration technologies are in use across the enterprise, how many integrations depend on each, and which technologies are rationalization targets. The Enterprise Model depends on it as the governing record of data flow relationships between all enterprise entities — the connective tissue of the Enterprise Ontology. This inventory also directly seeds the Software Technologies Inventory through its Integration Technology attribute and enables governance of cross-environment and cross-boundary data flows through its Source and Target Environment attributes. This document is part of the IF4IT Enterprise Inventory Management taxonomy — the master catalog of all Noun Types the enterprise recognizes and tracks. The general principles that govern inventory design, schema definition, data quality standards, federated ownership, lifecycle management, and AI-assisted population apply to this inventory and every other inventory in the enterprise and are addressed in the IF4IT Enterprise Inventory Management Best Practices document. Practitioners should read that document alongside this one. The attribute taxonomy presented in this document is a suggested baseline — not a mandatory schema and not a complete enumeration of every possible attribute. Enterprises are explicitly encouraged to add attributes specific to their context, adapt what is here to their needs, and define what IF4IT has not yet identified.