This is an incredibly helpful and insightful article, and sorely needed.
Some follow-up questions:
In what area of EA it the table sn_apm_ws_ba_product_model_map actually maintained? (UPDATE: found it, it is in the AI Systems tab of an existing Business Application selected from the Application Portfolio list). What are the implications of the M2M relationship? What if one business application relates to many product models? What does this mean semantically? Are there business rules or best practices around the arity of relationships? What is the semantic difference between using this table to relate a business application to an AI product model, vs setting the AI product model as the model_id of the business application?
Where and how is the cmdb_rel_asset_ci table maintained? Similar questions about the M2M aspect. I get that an information asset can be "deployed as" multiple CIs (prod, qa, dev, for example). But what if there are multiple assets related to a single CI? Also, what current or future products are making use of this table? And how does, say, a hardware asset get deployed to multiple CIs? Is this table used in any way to maintain the data between Assets and CIs? Is the goal to replace the direct bi-directional references?
