The Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF) is a vendor alliance. This alliance was convened to streamline the management of diverse operating systems commonly found in an enterprise. The DMTF includes industry-wide workgroups, which identify the pieces of information that are necessary to manage specific categories of devices.

As part of this effort, the DMTF has published a standard that is called the Desktop Management Interface Specification.

The SystemView Agent program provides access to system components that have been defined according to the DMI standard by acting as an SNMP agent. Although the DMI itself is protocol-independent, SystemView Agent can detect any DMI-enabled components in the system and translate the MIF information into SNMP objects that conform to the management information base (MIB) format. This MIF-to-MIB mapping is performed automatically by a DMI subagent provided with SystemView Agent.