IT management across SAF profiles and maturity
A profile defines a sufficient modeling scope; maturity defines relationship completeness and the quality of fact governance. No cell below is an assessment of ITSM, COBIT, FitSM, SRE, or DevOps maturity.
3×3 matrix
| Profile / maturity | Catalog | Connected Model | Governed Model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Startup | One customer Service, owner, product System, and production environment; a Channel where there is direct customer contact. External tickets link at least to the Service. | The Service traces to a Process, System, Component, and Deployment; the pipeline publishes deployment_id; critical SLOs are defined. | The owner, actual version, SLOs, and significant incidents are reviewed; architecture-to-production drift is examined regularly. |
| Stable Business | Catalog of business and technical services, key owners, Systems, environments, CIs, and criticality. | Service offerings, Services, Processes, Capabilities, Systems, and CIs are linked; incidents and changes refer to the Service and configuration. | Authoritative sources, mapping lifecycle, SLA/SLO, change traceability, and data-quality measures are defined. |
| Enterprise | Federated service, product, asset, CI, and architecture catalogs with a shared identifier and classification scheme. | An end-to-end graph connects business services, technical services, products, applications, infrastructure, and operational dependencies across domains. | Governance defines owners, policies, exceptions, assurance, federated reconciliation, audit trail, and change impact on the portfolio. |
Minimum by profile
Startup
The priority is dependable delivery and fast feedback. A stable customer-Service ID, owner, primary Components, production Deployment, a few user-facing SLOs, and links from incident and deployment tooling are sufficient. A full CMDB is usually premature; actual configuration may be obtained from cloud APIs and IaC.
Stable Business
Multiple Channels and teams, an offering catalog, inter-System dependencies, a service desk, changes, and service-level agreements appear. An explicit SAF–CMDB bridge and separation of business services, technical services, CIs, and assets provide value here.
Enterprise
The primary challenge is not the presence of catalogs but alignment of identity, ownership, and sources of truth across domains and suppliers. Federation, temporal validity of relationships, provenance, policy, assurance, and governed exceptions are required.
Minimum by maturity level
Catalog
Objects are listed and have an owner, status, and identifier. Links from operational systems may be incomplete, but names are not used as the only key.
Connected Model
It is possible to navigate from a consumer and service offering to a SAF Service, Process, Capability, System, Component, Deployment, CI, and current operational records. The mapping type is explicit.
Governed Model
A source of truth is assigned to each data class, quality and validity periods are checked, and mapping history and exception decisions are retained. Measures show not only record counts but also whether relationships are fit for impact analysis and service management.
Recommended evolution
- Start with stable Service identifiers and owners.
- Link Services to Systems and actual Deployments.
- Add a service offering and SLO only where there is a consumer-relevant distinction.
- Introduce CIs for items whose configuration is actually controlled.
- Link incidents, changes, and releases by identifier without copying records.
- Assign sources of truth and drift checks.
- Expand the model through federation while preserving original SAF identifiers.
Detailed entity boundaries are on the Relationships between SAF and IT management page.