Business Application: best practices

[jna2756]

Hi all,

We're working on refining our CMDB and making sure everything in our environment is captured as required one of errors where we got a lot of conflicts internally is business applications. Can some people provide what are common examples of applications and what shouldn't be applications?

For example, I know an application like ServiceNow, ServiceNow ITSM, Salesforce, etc. are applications. However, are there any examples of things that some people might consider an application but shouldn't be consider a business application? some things that seem fuzzy to me is Microsoft Outlook, Apache, Cisco Prime wireless controller.

Thanks

Joshua Anderson

[Cassandra Kittl]

I highly recommend doing the following:

• Determine your expected use (use case, reasons etc) for the Business Application and build an assessment to be used against the application(s) in question.
  • For example - to further classify the IPCs (incidents, problems, and changes) as well as get measures of number of tickets (IPC) a COTS package might be listed as a Business Application.
• Establish a taxonomy for the naming convention (I'll try to find the link to a blog post written by Mark Bodman).
  • Remember to address platforms (ServiceNow, Salesforce, M365, Cisco from your list above can be considered platforms). 
• Also establish a governance or control model for additions and modifications to the Business Applications (and lifecycle)
• Consider having phases for populating the attributes of the Business Applications.

[jna2756]

Thanks for the feedback Cassandra! We're actually do points 3-4 very similar to how you described already in are somewhat well refined CMDB. We are currently going through another cycle of defining additional use cases that are bringing up these questions. In this case, we are trying to determine what infrastructure "tools" should be classified as an business application. For example, should the firewall manager tool that the network team uses to manage the internal firewalls be considered an Business Application? What about the "tools" used to upgrade switches routers etc?

[AustinN]

I would consider the technology tools that infrastructure teams are using to be Technical Services or an Offering underpinning a higher level Technical Service. 

[Derrick-FMR]

The model currently sets Technical Services and Offerings to be more on the people side of the house - showing accountability and support.  The tools should be business applications if they are being used to provide for a business capability of the company.  At my work we are also discussing this as I think we have a bunch of people that agree with you.  My job this week is to figure out how to show these services (of a technical nature) that are completely tool based...