Businesses everywhere are feeling the 'pinch' to develop new governance that is appropriate for their environment. Such governance may in some situations be a competitive advantage in specialized areas of core competency, but in other situations, are more likely to be functions that can be 'commoditized', and even outsourced in some situations. A common vocabulary is a critical foundation of such efforts. Once that is in place, the logical next step is the establishment of a process architecture to organize the governance system, process assets, and organizational interfaces.

This project is working on providing automation support for developing such a taxonomy for such activities that can be constructed and evolved in an 'open-source'-type environment. The elements of this technology ideally would work at many levels in an enterprise, since (for example) development activities exist in many contexts - for external products, for engineering internal support components (such as those constructed by IT departments), and for building tooling and test fixtures used to support engineering and operation. The idea behind the taxonomy is not to mandate that each of these use an identical process, but rather to create a categorization system which allows for the potential to share, reuse, and harvest knowledge from related efforts to the greatest degree possible. In a similar fashion, it should be recognized that there will be significant similarities (as well as important differences) between processes such as IT service management, operations order fulfillment, and customer service problem tracking. The taxonomy should accomodate these similarities and differences, while preserving clarity, simplicity, and efficient operation.

A very preliminary list (broken down into technical and business groupings) has been developed, but will need further elaboration; the two groupings may not be retained separately as we move forward. The features of the site to capture the details of this framework need to be prototyped. Finally, the framework will need to be able to be related to external frameworks such as those being explored in this project.