Skip to content
7lens Docs
7lens.io Register to Test

Onboarding in under 40 hours

Who this is for: the architect or platform lead who sets up 7lens for the enterprise. What you need: access to the Configuration UI, and the people who own your business structure, geography, and technology catalog.

The steps at a glance:

  1. Understand the Data Model: the four axes and how they connect.
  2. Configure your Groups: how you classify the enterprise, and who owns each value.
  3. Onboard your Organization: regions, countries, legal entities.
  4. Onboard your Technology: Stacks, Services, Offerings, starting from OSM.
  5. Onboard your Business: Domains and Applications.
  6. Define roles and users: people, AI agents, and systems.
  7. Create and use your Lenses: start with the use case that brings the most value.

Select a screenshot to enlarge it. In the viewer, use +, −, and 0, or drag to pan.

First configure the enterprise. Then define who and what can use it. Then put that context to work through Lenses.

  1. Understand the Data Model

    Start with the four axes: Groups strategically organize the enterprise, Organization covers geographies and legal entities, Technology covers technology stacks and services, and Business covers business structure and applications. Understand how the four fit together before you configure anything.

    Overview: the four axes at a glance, what is configured in each, and whether the configuration is valid.

  2. Configure Your Groups

    Groups are the most strategic part of the configuration — they define how you strategically organize the enterprise. They matter again later: the Owner of each Group value can set role and access boundaries.

    Groups: the Business Division Group and its values, each with its own Owner, edited as a tree or as YAML.

  3. Onboard Your Organization

    Configure where the enterprise operates: regions, countries, and legal entities. This is the geographic and legal foundation everything else maps back to.

    Organization: Region, Sub-region, Country and Legal Entity. Each Legal Entity has an Owner and its Group values.

  4. Onboard Your Technology

    Technology is organized through recursive technology stacks and services. 7lens open sourced the Open Service Catalog Model (OSM) because of the value it provides to the wider community. The model is designed to work with the relevant industry standards, frameworks, and compliance requirements.

    Define your technology stack and services using the open source model, designed for easy integration with ServiceNow.
    View OSM on GitHub
    Technology: Stacks, Services and their Offerings. Here, the GitHub Enterprise Cloud Offering of the Source Control Service.

  5. Onboard Your Business

    Business is organized through recursive Domains, each mapped to one Legal Entity, and each Application sits in one Domain. Frameworks (for example TOGAF, ISO 27001 or DORA) and Integrations (for example ServiceNow CSDM) are enabled once, on the Groups axis; Business inherits that enablement.

    Frameworks, such as DORA, GDPR, ISO/IEC 27001 or TOGAF, and Integrations, such as ServiceNow CSDM: two of the three containers on the Groups axis.

  6. Define Roles and Users

    Define who and what can use the configured enterprise: Humans, AI Agents, and Systems, each with different access and update responsibilities.

    Groups can set role and access boundaries, through the Owner of each value.

  7. Create and Use Your Lenses

    Put the configured Context to work. Start with the use cases that bring the most value: where a decision is waiting and the data already exists, spread across your systems.

    • Pick a question a leader needs answered and cannot answer today.
    • Check that the facts already live in the systems you have.
    • Start with one Lens, then combine and extend.

    We prepared the seven most common use cases as reference Lenses. Use them as a starting point:

    Configuring the 7 Lenses

100%