Services Inventory and Attributes

About This Inventory

The Services Inventory governs every Service the enterprise has chosen to govern — every named, owned, defined offering that meets the criteria of a governed Service. Each Noun Instance is a single Service with its own Semantic ID, its own Service Owner, its own Service Definition (purpose, description, inputs, outputs, performance expectations, and supporting tools), and its own complete set of governance attributes. A Service in this inventory is distinct from an Application (which may enable many Services), a Capability (which is the standing ability a Service realizes), a Service Request or Service Record (which is a single transactional instance of a Service being invoked), and a Process (which orchestrates work, sometimes by exercising one or more Services). The inventory is the enterprise’s single source of truth for the answer to the question: what Services do we govern, who owns them, what do they deliver, and how do they connect to the rest of the Enterprise Model?

Document Organization

This document is organized into attribute categories, each forming its own subsection. Each subsection contains one part with an attribute table. The attribute table has three columns: Attribute Name, Maturity, and Description and Notes. The Attribute Name column uses bold black text in Title Case — multi-value attributes append [Multi-Value] below the name, and hierarchical attributes append [Hierarchical]. The Maturity column contains one of three values: Crawl (minimum viable attributes without which the inventory cannot function as a governance instrument), Walk (attributes that add the rigor needed for assessment, rationalization, and financial analysis), or Run (attributes that enable advanced analytics, AI-assisted portfolio intelligence, and cross-inventory derivation). The Description and Notes column is structured into labeled subsections: Description — what the attribute captures; Benefit(s) — the governance value it produces; Source — whether the value is Manual, Derived from another inventory, or Calculated; Examples — concrete sample values where format or convention aids understanding; and Notes — implementation guidance, valid values, or connections to other inventories, omitted when nothing meaningful to add. The attributes shown represent the IF4IT’s current best thinking for governing the Services Inventory — a suggested baseline, not a complete enumeration. Practitioners will encounter attributes in their own implementations that are not listed here and are encouraged to add them. No attribute in this document is mandatory.

General Governance Principles

For the general inventory governance principles that apply to this inventory — including semantic identifier conventions, data quality standards, owner accountability, lifecycle management, AI-assisted population, and the connection to the Enterprise Model — refer to the IF4IT Enterprise Inventory Management Best Practices document.

Customization

Every attribute in this document is a recommendation — not a mandate. Enterprises are explicitly encouraged to add attributes specific to their context, rename attributes to match their existing vocabulary, adjust valid value sets to match their organizational standards, collapse or expand attribute categories for their tooling, and sequence Crawl/Walk/Run adoption differently based on their priorities. Three things are discouraged: removing foundational Crawl attributes entirely, since portfolio governance consistently fails without them; ignoring the Source designation for Calculated and Derived attributes, since manually entering system-populated values creates data quality problems that compound over time; and abandoning the Semantic Identifier convention, since it is the connective tissue that makes cross-inventory traversal and AI-assisted analysis possible in the Enterprise Model.

Tooling Guidance

The Crawl/Walk/Run maturity tagging in this document applies not only to which attributes to collect but also to what tooling is appropriate at each stage. At Crawl maturity, a well-structured shared spreadsheet — Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel shared via SharePoint, or equivalent — is a completely acceptable starting point for this inventory. A spreadsheet with the Crawl-tagged attributes populated for every known Noun Instance is more valuable than a sophisticated inventory management tool with no data in it. At Walk maturity, a lightweight database, Airtable, Notion, or a basic configuration item structure within an ITSM platform provides the query, filter, and reporting capabilities that spreadsheets make difficult at scale. At Run maturity, a dedicated inventory platform, a ServiceNow ITAM or APM module, or a custom data store integrated with the Enterprise Model supports full API connectivity, automated derivation of calculated attributes, and real-time cross-inventory relationship traversal. Governance discipline and data quality matter far more than tooling sophistication — start where the organization is, and let tooling follow.