Lifecycles

Development organizations and other parts of our enterprises participate in many lifecycles. More specifically, the artifacts we work with participate in those lifecycles. Those artifacts become part of assets; so - assets participate in lifecycles.

We will not describe broader business processes and other lifecycles here, but we will focus on the lifecycles within which the asset management scenarios are performed.

The asset management scenarios we are initially focusing on (Publish, Search, Retrieve) will execute within the context of one or more lifecycles. For a given asset type, a sample lifecycle could be:

• development org submits/modifies an asset (publish asset)
• asset participates in QA review (search, retrieve, publish asset)
• asset participates in Legal review
• asset participates in UAT review
• operations team signs off the asset
• operations monitors, reports on asset
• development org declares asset to be retired
• development org retires the asset

For the asset to transition through the lifecycle there are several key participants including a repository which holds the asset's information and its artifacts and other governance-related information such as access rights and the asset's state. Other key participants include policy management, which verifies the asset is well-formed and predictable throughout the lifecycle. The image below outlines some of the key participants which are included in the context of lifecycles.