Software Technologies Inventory and Attributes

The Software Technologies Inventory governs every discrete, governable software product the enterprise procures, obtains, installs, operates, or depends upon. A software technology qualifies for registration when it can be obtained — purchased, licensed, or adopted as open source — installed or instantiated on infrastructure, identified by a specific version, and eventually retired when it reaches end of life. Database engines, language runtimes, compilers, middleware, message brokers, web and application servers, container platforms, operating systems, identity software, security tooling, observability tooling, and machine learning frameworks all qualify in this sense.

Several adjacent things do not. Business-facing applications that people interact with to deliver a business capability are governed by the Applications Inventory; software technologies are the layer those applications are built on, deployed on, and depend upon. The organizations that supply software technologies are governed by the Vendors Inventory, and the entitlements under which technologies are used are governed by their own inventories, though a technology’s licensing model is recorded here as one of its attributes. The boundary between a software technology and an application is not always sharp — a development environment, a low-code platform, or a data platform with a rich administrative interface can reasonably be governed as either. This document does not attempt to resolve that boundary universally; where an enterprise draws the line is a governance decision it makes for itself.