Software Technologies Inventory and Attributes

Software Technologies is one of forty-five recognized Noun Types in the IF4IT Enterprise Inventory Management taxonomy — the master catalog of all enterprise inventory types. For the full taxonomy, the governing principles that apply across all inventories, and the Inventory of Inventories that federates them, refer to the IF4IT Enterprise Inventory Management Best Practices document.

Five Noun Types sit closest to Software Technologies. Applications are built on and run within software technologies, and software technologies are consumed by them. Vendors supply commercially licensed software technologies, and this inventory consumes vendor identity and support relationships from them. AI Agents are built on and run within machine learning and model-serving software technologies. Integrations are carried by messaging, middleware, and gateway software technologies, in a cross-referencing relationship. Data and Information assets are stored and served by database and data platform software technologies. A secondary band relates less centrally but genuinely: Capabilities, which software technologies help enable; IT Operating Environments, within which software technologies are deployed; Software Licenses and Software Subscriptions, which govern the entitlements under which technologies are used; Source Code Repositories, which hold what development software builds; Regulatory Agencies, whose requirements attach to technologies in regulated contexts; and Value Streams, for which certain technologies are critical-path dependencies. Noun Types whose inventories are not yet published are named here with their relationship; refer to the IF4IT Enterprise Inventory Management Best Practices document for their current definitions.

Software Technologies is not Applications, not Vendors, and not Software Licenses. It governs the technology layer applications run on, not the applications; the technologies themselves, not the organizations that supply them; and the technology as a governed thing, not the entitlement under which it is used.