Need help defining an IT architecture term or acronym?

A computer program or set of programs designed to automate a business process or deliver value to end users.

Refers to the structure and behavior of IT systems, processes, and infrastructure within an organization.

A programming interface that lets two pieces of software exchange data and trigger actions in a structured, predictable way.

A software system driven by an LLM that plans steps, calls tools, and acts to reach a goal — without continuous human input.

An open standard modeling language for enterprise architecture, maintained by The Open Group, complementary to TOGAF.

Business Continuity Plan: the organizational and technical measures that let a company keep its essential activities running through a major disruption.

What an organization is able to do — independently of how it does it. The foundational pivot of modern enterprise mapping.

Configuration Management Database: a central repository that tracks every IT asset — applications, servers, licenses, cloud resources — and the relationships between them.

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Kabeen vs CMDB

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4 Key Steps to Implement a CMDB

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What is a CMDB?

Chief Information Officer (DSI in French): the executive who runs the IT organization and the information system, aligning technology with business strategy.

Hierarchical representation of an organization's business capabilities, the reference deliverable of enterprise architecture.

Effective internal recharging of IT and cloud costs to the business units that consume them, based on actual measurement.

Any component tracked in a CMDB because a change, loss, or misconfiguration would impact an IT service.

The practice of assigning every IT expense to a cost center, team, project, or product to enable analysis and accountability.

Describes the path data takes from its original source to its destination point.

Disaster Recovery Plan: the technical IT subset of a BCP that describes how to restore the information system after a disruption, within agreed RTO and RPO targets.

Digital Operational Resilience Act: the EU regulation that imposes strict IT resilience requirements on financial institutions, in force since January 2025.

Enterprise Architecture Management: a strategic planning discipline to align business and IT landscapes.

Enterprise Resource Planning: software to manage and integrate important business processes.

An architecture practice that structures the information system into zones, neighborhoods, and blocks to keep it coherent, scalable, and aligned with the business.

Cloud Financial Operations: the practice that aligns engineering, finance, and business to govern and optimize cloud spend at scale.

Generative AI: the family of models that produce text, code, images, audio, or video from a natural-language instruction.

A generative AI model producing false or invented information with the same confidence as a correct answer.

The process of visually delineating an organization's IT infrastructure.

IT Service Management: the discipline of designing, delivering, operating and continuously improving IT services so they actually fit what the business needs.

The set of policies, processes, and decision bodies that steer IT investments, risk, and value, and keep the IT estate aligned with business strategy.

Identity and Access Management: the processes, policies, and technologies that control who accesses what in the IT estate.

IT Asset Management: the discipline that tracks the inventory, financial value, and lifecycle of every IT asset across the organization.

The international reference framework for IT service management best practices, now in its ITIL 4 release.

The international standard that defines the requirements for an AI management system (AIMS), published in December 2023.

A quantifiable measure used to evaluate success in achieving performance objectives.

Large Language Model: an AI model trained on massive text corpora that can understand and generate natural language.

Practice of steering the lifecycle of an organization's software licenses: purchase, deployment, assignment, usage tracking, renewal, compliance.

Model Context Protocol: an open standard published by Anthropic in 2024 to securely connect AI models to external tools, data, and applications.

European cybersecurity directive that extends NIS requirements to 18 critical sectors, transposed into French law in 2024-2025.

The collection of software applications and software-based services available to a business.

A category of cloud computing services providing a platform for developing and running applications.

A strategy used in IT management to identify which applications should be kept, replaced, or consolidated.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation: an architecture that combines information retrieval with LLM generation to produce answers grounded in verified sources.

The practice of continuously adjusting IT resource capacity (compute, storage, licenses) to the actual measured need to eliminate over-provisioning.

Software-as-a-Service: a cloud software delivery model where a vendor hosts an application and sells access to it by subscription over the Internet.

IT systems, solutions, and activities carried out within an organization without IT department approval.

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How to Detect Shadow IT?

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What is Shadow IT?

The use of generative AI tools by employees without the approval or oversight of IT, security, legal or compliance functions.

Software Asset Management: the discipline that governs the lifecycle, compliance, and cost of an organization's software licenses.

Service Level Agreement: a measurable commitment on the quality of an IT service, with defined indicators (availability, response time, RTO).

Single Sign-On: an authentication pattern that lets a user log in once to access multiple applications.

The uncontrolled proliferation of SaaS applications in an organization, generating hidden costs, security risks, and operational complexity.

Software Bill of Materials: a detailed, structured inventory of every software component making up an application, including versions and licenses.

The practice of displaying IT costs to business units without actually charging back, providing transparency and accountability.

The state in which an IT asset becomes outdated due to technological advances or end of life.

Total Cost of Ownership: the estimation of all costs associated with an IT asset throughout its lifecycle.

A model to classify applications: Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, Eliminate.

The Open Group Architecture Framework: the most widely adopted methodology for designing, planning and governing enterprise architecture.

The future cost of short-term technical shortcuts — in code, architecture, or tooling — that will have to be paid back to keep the IT estate moving.

The desired state of the IT estate at a 3-5 year horizon, guiding investment arbitration and transformation choices.

An end-to-end chain of activities that creates value for an external or internal customer. The analytical pivot of business-IT performance.

Structured management of the IT vendor lifecycle: selection, contracting, performance monitoring, risk management, renewal and exit.