1. A computer-executable method for allocating resource discovery and identification processes among a plurality of management tools and resources in a distributed and heterogeneous IT management system, the method comprising: providing at least one authoritative manageable resource having minimal or no responsibility for reporting its identity, minimal or no responsibility for advertising any lifecycle-related creation event for the resource, and minimal or no responsibility for advertising any lifecycle-related destruction event for the resource; using a service oriented architecture (SOA) to define one or more services needed to manage the resource within the management system; using a component model to define one or more interfaces and one or more interactions to be implemented by the manageable resource within the management system; and performing a staged migration wherein a reference to a non-authoritative manageable resource is updated or replaced with a reference to an authoritative manageable resource implementation in response to the authoritative manageable resource implementation being located and indexing the authoritative manageable resource implementation within a domain scoped instance registry.