Business Application Scope of Inclusion

[Stuart Tucker]

How far do you go with listing Business Applications that contribute towards the running of your Business? Some applications that support a business capability are so generic and so far outside of your control and management, it questions the value of having them in the CMDB. For example, you may use Reuters or Bloomberg for financial information and news, but there is no agreement or direct service relationship, they are still important resources, but responsibility to these applications ends at providing internet connectivity to the application. Do you include them for completeness or not?

[EricDohr]

Each organization will need to define what is and what is not a Business Application.  There has to be value to track the Business Application record, so that would be the principal concept, IMO.

Here are a few concepts I have seen used to help justify having a Business Application record.  Some of these are specific functions of Strategic Portfolio Management and Application Portfolio Management.  If you have not adopted SPM or APM yet, that could alter your logic.  Make sure you have alignment and a group internally that can review requests to say, “Does it make sense to have a Business Application record." This was a regular discussion with me as a Portfolio Manager and my Enterprise Architect peers in my previous role. 

• You have one or many application stacks (Application Services) that should be aggregated into a Business Application record
• Manage the inventory of records and be able to organize based on concepts such as the following (these are fields that would not be on service of offering records)

• Application Type (COTS, Homegrown, etc.)
• Architecture Type (Client-Server, N-Tier, web-based, Platform App, Platform Host)
• Install Type (on-prem, cloud, hybrid)
• Platform
• Organize by Application category
• Be able to correlate to an Application Family
• Indicate user base/user count
• Technology stack

• Identify critical roles such as Business Owner and IT Application Owner
• Define compliance topics such as Business Criticality, Data Classification, and Emergency Tier
• Correlate Contracts and Expense lines for financial planning
• Apply a scoring methodology for assessments such as business capability scoring

• Technical risk indicators
• Business value indicators
• CSAT
• Functional / Strategic Fit
• Maintenance Costs

• Associate records with Information Object attribute such as Customer PII and CRUD (create, read, update, and delete)
• Correlate records to Business Capabilities, so I can complete assessments to understand what we support well and what are the gaps

• Note, you can correlate Business Services to Business Capabilities from a CSDM aspect. 

• Utilize concepts for strategic architecture, such as application rationalization, business capabilities, and technology portfolio management, to drive demand

• Be able to correlate investments between legacy applications and new desired technologies
• As part of demand management, you can correlate to records such as Business Capabilities and Business Applications

• Utilize ServiceNow functionality such as (with APM)

• Business Portfolio: Hierarchy Map
• Information Portfolio: Information Objects
• Application landscape reports
• Application Roadmap
• Application assessment dashboard
• Application Indicators (Performance Analytics)
• Application 360 PA Dashboard and correlating indicators
• TPM dashboard

• Application TCO via financial modeling tools
• By having this record, would it follow existing CI Health logic or would there be challenges to a quality record/relationship?

Definitely check out the APM Workshop for more input

[Stuart Tucker]

Thank you. So, it seems it's up to us! 

I think the gap here is that an 'application' may be providing a Business Capability, so it meets that check, but it is not hosted by us, carries no cost, does not have a lifecycle, needs no maintenance, holds none of our data and is low risk, so it fails all the other checks on whether it should be a Business Application.

[EricDohr · Accepted solution]

In some cases, could it be that you want to record it as it is a free tool that could replace existing solutions (maybe other free or paid) as part of the roadmap?  Does something like Bloomberg require certain support expectations and could it lead to an enterprise license agreement.  You can see, in many cases this is more from a roadmap perspective.  

Sometimes the biggest challenge is not should we have a record, but who is accountable for maintaining it.  This becomes a challenge when it is unclear what portfolio manages it, no ownership, and other challenges to good data.   Maybe you could have some way of showing the record as an unmanaged business application that would not go against your health rules and other concerns.  Like we know it exists, we do not know to what extent, there is no support model, it is not on the roadmap, etc.  But this way if you want to record notes, especially from an ARB perspective, you can still have a consistent record management.   Almost comes down to why do we need a record of this Business Application and what should we be doing with it?   Once again, what is the value of having this record and if that is tough to tell a story, most likely not a good fit.