Process and Activity Frameworks

TL;DR: APQC PCF is the pan-industry process anchor (13 top-level categories of operating + management processes). SCOR covers supply-chain ops, ITIL 4 covers IT service management, COBIT covers IT governance, PMBOK / PRINCE2 cover project management, Six Sigma / Lean cover quality and operations. WoT hosts all of these so downstream products can anchor "what work does this organization do" against canonical process taxonomies.

What this layer is for

Industry classifications (NAICS, ISIC, NACE) name what an organization does by sector. Process frameworks name how the work itself is organized: discrete activities, sub-processes, capabilities. The two are orthogonal: every NAICS sector executes the same APQC PCF top-level processes (it Develops Vision, Manages HR, Manages IT, Delivers Products / Services). The difference is which level-2 / level-3 elements are emphasized.

This layer matters when downstream products need to:

• Anchor a job posting against process language (an "Order Management Analyst" works on PCF 4.0 Deliver Physical Products and SCOR Deliver, not on a NAICS code).
• Crosswalk a benchmark report ("our Source-to-Pay cycle is X days") against the source taxonomy of the framework producing the benchmark.
• Drive process-mining or RPA pipelines that need standard activity vocabularies, not industry codes.
• Support consultative selling that maps a customer's pain ("our IT change-management is broken") to a published framework anchor (ITIL 4 IL.18 Change Enablement) rather than a free-text category.

System comparison

How these relate

graph LR
  PCF[APQC PCF<br/>13 cross-industry categories]
  SCOR[SCOR<br/>supply chain ops]
  ITIL[ITIL 4<br/>IT service mgmt]
  COBIT[COBIT 2019<br/>IT governance]
  PMBOK[PMBOK 7<br/>project mgmt]

  PCF -->|4.0 Deliver Physical / 5.0 Deliver Services overlap| SCOR
  PCF -->|8.0 Manage IT overlap| ITIL
  PCF -->|8.0 Manage IT + 11.0 Risk overlap| COBIT
  PCF -->|13.0 Develop and Manage Business Capabilities overlap| PMBOK

APQC PCF is the most general anchor. The others specialize:

• SCOR elaborates what PCF 4.0 (Deliver Physical Products) and 5.0 (Deliver Services) actually involve at the supply-chain level. Process Plan / Source / Make / Deliver / Return / Enable / Orchestrate.
• ITIL 4 elaborates what PCF 8.0 (Manage IT) involves at the service-management level. 25 practices grouped General / Service Mgmt / Technical.
• COBIT 2019 governs IT (overlaps PCF 8.0 and 11.0 Manage Enterprise Risk). 5 domains (EDM, APO, BAI, DSS, MEA), 40 objectives.
• PMBOK 7 elaborates what PCF 13.0 (Develop and Manage Business Capabilities) means when you are managing it as a portfolio of projects.
• Six Sigma / Lean are improvement methodologies that span PCF categories rather than living inside one.

Crosswalk navigation

WoT carries Level-1 conceptual crosswalks between APQC PCF and the supply-chain / IT / project-management frameworks listed above. These are tagged match_type='related' rather than 'exact' because they are conceptual overlaps (PCF 8.0 and ITIL 4 both cover IT operations), not strict identity. Use them as anchoring hints, not as substitution rules.

# Find what overlaps with APQC PCF 8.0 (Manage IT)
GET /api/v1/systems/apqc_pcf/nodes/8.0/equivalences

# Find what SCOR Deliver maps to in PCF
GET /api/v1/systems/scor_model/nodes/SC.04/equivalences

What WoT does not host

• Per-industry APQC PCFs (Banking, Healthcare, Telecom, etc.). APQC publishes industry-specific variants of the PCF; only the cross-industry skeleton is in this PR.
• APQC PCF Levels 2-5 (~1,500 detailed process elements). The full tree requires APQC's official spreadsheet (free with registration). The ingester (world_of_taxonomy/ingest/apqc_pcf.py) is structured for in-place extension when that file is provided; the system_id stays apqc_pcf so existing crosswalks survive.
• BPMN / DMN / CMMN notations. These are graphical modelling notations, not classification systems. They fail the inclusion policy's "stable identifiers" and "enumerated / hierarchical" tests because every vendor's BPMN library defines its own element subset.
• ISO 15926 (process plant data integration). Behind ISO paywall and per-part licensing; deferred unless a paying customer explicitly asks for it.

Use cases

1. Process discovery for consulting engagements. Anchor a discovery conversation against PCF Level-1 categories so all stakeholders use the same vocabulary.
2. Job-architecture design. Map a role to PCF + SCOR + ITIL elements to define what "good" looks like for the role's deliverables.
3. Benchmark normalization. When a vendor cites "our Order-to-Cash cycle averages 7 days," anchor against PCF 4.0 + SCOR Deliver to compare against your own metrics.
4. RPA / process mining tagging. Use PCF + SCOR / ITIL codes as the controlled vocabulary for activity logs feeding process-mining tools.
5. Compliance scoping. Map a control framework (NIST CSF, ISO 27001) against COBIT objectives to identify which IT processes the controls actually touch.

Related reading

• Industry Classification Guide - the orthogonal sector axis.
• Crosswalk Map - how systems connect via equivalence edges.
• Inclusion Policy - why BPMN and ISO 15926 are not in WoT.