System of Fact (SoF)

Within an enterprise documentation system, a system of facts (SoF) is one that stores the state of the enterprise and that allows access to such data through structured means (database access, APIs, file parsing, and so on). Systems or facts are a superset of system of records (SoR) given that they also include enterprise collaboration applications and analytical platforms, and configuration files.

Some examples of systems of facts are:

Foundational Business Support (API/Database access)
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
  - SAP ERP
  - Oracle ERP
- Customer Relationship Planning (CRM)
  - Salesforce
  - HubSpot
- Supply Chain Management (SCM)
  - SAP SCM
  - Oracle SCM
- Human Capital Management (HCM)
  - Workday
  - BambooHR
- Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)
  - IBM Maximo
  - HxGN EAM
- Accounting (examples of SMB packages)
  - QuickBooks
  - Xero
- Customer Service and Help Desk
  - ZenDesk
  - ServiceNow
Project Management (API Access)
- Atlassian Jira
- Basecamp
Analytics (Database Access; BI dashboards often play the role of specialist documentation platforms)
- Snowflake
- Databricks
Transactional Databases (Database Access)
- PostgreSQL
- ScyllaDB
Telemetry (Event Stream Parsing)
- Datadog
- Amazon CloudWatch
Infrastructure Configuration (Configuration Parsing)
- Terraform
- Azure Resource Manager
Source Code Management (API access and programming language file parsing)
- GitHub
- GitLab

SoFs versus Specialist Documentation Platforms

Most SoFs have a user interface, and as far as the domain SMEs are concerned, part of their ‘documentation’ lives indeed in such systems. There’s no reason as to why a system of fact couldn’t act as a specialist documentation platform and vice versa. The following table provides some guidance as to whether an SoF may also be considered a specialist documentation platform.

Aspect	SoF Only	SoF and Specialist Documentation Platform
Access credentials	System-specific	Same SSO credentials as the main documentation platform
Access permissions	Only domain SMEs	Most participants as those who can access the main documentation platform (at least in read-only mode)
UI	Installable desktop application	Web-based access, with specific content areas being uniformly addressable so that they can be connected with the rest of the enterprise’s body of knowledge.

DocOps Automation

Systems of facts are the easiest systems to integrate in DocOps automation workflows because they inherently provide direct database access, API-based integration, or files in a structured format (configuration, programming language source code, etc). The DocOps effort entails finding the relevant system’s endpoints, gaining access permissions, looking up the schema or interface specification, and then deciding what the most appropriate way to embed and blend the data is, depending on the chosen intermediate document format.