IT Profile¶

An IT profile is the actor profile of an automated process operating in the open metadata ecosystem.

Much of the activity in a metadata ecosystem is not performed by people. Integration connectors, governance services, engines and background jobs all make requests under their own user identities, and those requests appear in the header of every element they create or update. Without an IT profile, all that is visible is a userId. With one, it is possible to answer which piece of infrastructure did this, and who is responsible for it?

An IT profile:

• Links to the UserIdentity entities that the process runs under - often more than one, since a process may use different identities for different purposes.
• Links, via the ITInfrastructureProfile relationship, to the IT infrastructure asset that the profile represents.
• Can be appointed to an IT profile role, in the same way that a person is appointed to a person role. The role defines the capabilities and responsibilities; the profile identifies what is currently fulfilling them.

This is what makes automated activity traceable in the same terms as human activity: the provenance of metadata created by automation resolves to a described, owned piece of infrastructure rather than an anonymous account.

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