Skip to content

Semantic Management Framework

An open, technology-independent operating model for managing business meaning across people, data, analytics and AI.

Start with the discipline See the gross margin example

Two things can be true. Gross margin can mean one thing to the product team and another to services, and both can be right. The failure is when that difference stays invisible behind a shared label.

Context selects the perspective. When context can't, ask.

The missing discipline

Organizations already manage IT services (ITIL), data (DAMA), architecture (TOGAF), master data (MDM), analytical models (model risk management) and AI systems (AI governance). Business meaning, meaning what a number or a term actually means to the people and systems that use it, has had no discipline of its own. Read why it needs one →

Start here

Business and analytics leaders

Why meaning needs its own discipline, and how SMF hands off to the frameworks you already run.

The gross margin example

Three leaders, three correct numbers, and an AI assistant that guesses. How SMF fixes it.

Getting started

What to do in your first week, quarter or year: small team, mid-size or enterprise.

Metric Contract

The one-page agreement on what a number means, who owns it and what it can be compared with.

The framework

Principles

Led by two things can be true.

Vocabulary

Term, concept, perspective, context, and the five answers.

Lifecycle

What happens to a meaning, from definition to evolution.

Nine practices

Each adoptable on its own, at any size.

Contracts in context

How SMF contracts sit alongside data contracts and metric catalogs.

Works with

The frameworks and tools SMF plugs into, not competes with.

Use it

Framework licensed CC BY 4.0 · Reference code licensed Apache-2.0 · Licensing