Business Application and Business Owner

[Alex111]

We have an issue and I'm curious is anybody else has this issue or concern with their business application records.  We could have a single business owner, but many times there might be a group associated with that business owner and as we have had many changes at those levels, it would be prudent for us to keep the group that actually owns that business application too.  I do agree, when someone leaves, there should be a process to make sure ALL the roles that person has should get updated, but we just don't have that process developed or executed, so till that happens, does anybody have a good solution and we would rather stay OOTB (out of the box).

Note: I did consider business unit and department, but we do not currently have departments linked to anything official, so that is not usable and the BU is too broad for that data.

We also did consider extending the table with the field, but that does incur tech debt for future updates to that table/form.  Although, even though they had a couple small changes, not much has happen to that table.

Last piece that we had come up on this issue, we sometimes actually have two different business owners, two unique people, sometimes from different groups.  It's possible as a company we are doing something incorrect, but in the health industry, this has come up with some of our services, so it is something I have to consider.  Someone made a suggestion to just create an owners group for both of them and possibly their groups associated to both of them in that central group.

Any ideas are greatly appreciated, please don't judge us with the lack of processes to maintain those people, that is something we will have to work on, but is a longer goal to achieve.

Thank you in advance!

Alex Y.

[Mathew Hillyard]

Hi @Alex111 

Answering your second question first, you have both IT Application Owner and Business Owner fields. Typically when multiple stakeholders are identified, they're usually performing different roles - so apply a RACI matrix to the roles to see how they differ. Often the Business Owner is the Accountable and the ITAO is the Responsible. It's a poor practice to have two or more people who are genuinely Accountable, precisely because of the lack of accountability to a single individual, so if this is the case then your organisation may need to have a rethink! You could fudge the ownership but I have seen some customers add one or two additional ownership references which are credible.

For groups, the Managed by and Support group fields are available OOTB on the Business Application form. Again, consider the purpose of the group - Managed by is more about ownership, whereas Support would be more applicable to 3rd support (bearing in mind Business Applications are not an operational CI).

If you want to associate multiple teams then add the Teams related list, where you can select any group and associate with a Group type.

I hope this helps!

Mat

[Alex111]

For some reason we don't have the IT application owner on our form, could have been missed on an upgrade, regardless I did see it in my PDI, so we'll get our form back to OOTB.

I do agree about the Managed By group field for ownership and for the business application that could work for the group that should own it, it should include in that group the "owner" who is responsible/accountable for the business application.

I did not know about the Teams related list, that is great and I like how it only allows you to add groups for each specific area, support, change, managed by and approval.  That will be helpful for us to use going forward!

Great info, thank you all!

[Holly Hook]

Hi Alex,

Also in healthcare. We have a table called "Business App Expert" that is embedded onto the APM form. 

The business app expert list currently has 4 options (technical SME, system admin, security admin, and IT App Owner). I don't think these quite fit the need that people are looking for....but you could have a table similar to this and have your own values. The field on our table is called "Expertise Level". 

It also tracks primary or secondary contact. This is impt. For the BC and DR folks and we try to collect from the SMP. 

Ideally we would like to have a contact populated for each location that uses the app.