Value Streams Inventory and Attributes

The Value Streams Inventory is the authoritative enterprise record of every value stream the organization operates — every end-to-end flow through which the enterprise delivers value to a stakeholder. Each Noun Instance in this inventory is a single, uniquely identified Value Stream — an ordered sequence of stages that begins with a triggering stakeholder need and ends with delivered value — along with all governed attributes that describe what it delivers, who is accountable for it, how long it takes, how efficiently value flows through it, what it costs, and how important it is to the enterprise’s strategy. Without a governed Value Streams Inventory, enterprises cannot systematically see how value is delivered end to end, cannot locate the bottlenecks and hand-offs that constrain delivery, and cannot connect their capability and technology investments to the flows of value those investments are meant to improve. The Value Streams Inventory is a foundational governance artifact for Enterprise Architecture. Where the Capabilities Inventory records what the enterprise is able to do, the Value Streams Inventory records how those abilities are orchestrated into flows that deliver value. The two inventories are complementary views of the same enterprise: a Value Stream is composed of an ordered sequence of stages, and is enabled by the set of Capabilities that those stages draw upon. Enterprise Architecture uses the Value Streams Inventory to analyze how value is delivered, to locate where delivery is slow or constrained, and to target improvement where it will most improve stakeholder outcomes. The Enterprise Model depends on it as the layer that connects the enterprise’s capabilities, applications, processes, organizational units, vendors, data, and regulatory obligations to the flows of value they collectively produce. 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.