Relating multiple business groups to a business application

[Bryan I]

I have a business issue I've been trying to brainstorm for a while. I have a way of approaching this, but I'm interested to see if anyone else deals with this and how they've addressed it.

In our organization, business applications have their standard owners (IT, Business) and their support groups. However, business applications are often used by multiple business units. Therefore, if an application goes down or there is a major incident, they want to know about it. However, there is no good way to denote this type of multiple owner or shared impacted scenario.

For example, a application is owned by business unit A, and that same business unit is applied to the application service.  However, business units B and C also rely on the same application. If there's an incident, we know quickly to notify contacts within business unit A, but without a clear relationship denoted in some way, we don't know to contact B and C.

To make this more complex, there are dozens of business units that are defined, and it's a one-to-many relationship possitibility to any application. The business units also exist in a hierarchy based on our business structure, and that hierarchy matters (if a sub-unit has an issue, contacts within their parent business unit may also want to know).

The option we've come up with at this point is creating technical services, one for each parent business unit, and then service offerings for each of the child business units. At least in this way we can have multiple technical service offerings (Business Unit A Technology, etc.) tied to the application service.

Any other good ideas out there? Anyone else had to solve for something like this? We're trying to avoid any custom fields, pick lists, etc., and technical services solve for the use case of being able to walk the breadcrumb trail for automation, such as change or incident notifications.  However, I'm absolutely open to any ideas! 

[Niklas Peterson · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Here are my reflections. First of all, Business Applications are not operational CIs, they do not "go down". At this strategic level you should have a very straight ownership.

At the next level, Service Instances (Application Services) you have things that can "go down". Here it looks to me that you are mixing the service consumer with the service provider. You can have a Service Instance being part of multiple Business Services (or service offerings) but you still need to have a clear ownership of each entity. The Technical Service manages the Service Instance and is not different for different Business Units.

If you are looking to inform people based on how they are impacted by services they consume, you should use Business Services offerings to create the mapping with the organisation.

Regards,
Niklas

[Bryan I]

Thanks Niklas - this is great insight. We have clear ownership of Business Applications, and I agree with your comment.  We're mixing the provider and consumption side, so we'll take the idea and shift them to business services/service offerings to help show how the applications are consumed. 

Thanks again!
Bryan