Is there a recommendation that Business Application should not be used for ITSM objects?

[AMNedungadi]

Is there a recommendation that Business Application should not be used/ associated for ITSM objects? For example, business application reference is included on the Incident / Problem forms?

[CMDB Whisperer]

Yes.  Business Applications are the selection of software technology to be used by an organization to provide business capabilities.  They are not operational CIs.  For simplicity, think of it like this.  You can't break it until you deploy it.  You can't change it until you deploy it.  The deployed instance of a Business Application is an Application Service.  When you are submitting an Incident, the CI you specify should be as specific as possible based on what is known and based on where the issue is observed.  It should not be anything higher than the deployed instance/Application Service.  There are separate fields and related lists that can store Services, Offerings, and Business Applications that are related to the Incident, but those are indirect.  You should never allow the specification of a Business Application as the CI on an incident, change, problem, etc.

[Philippe Lamber]

The Incident table does not provide a reference field to Application services; previously, a reference to Business Services was offered, to allow end-users to communicate about a malfunction of a business application even without being able to identify precisely the defective CI (most ofte the case...).

Recently we have noticed that in Utah (probably from Tokyo and up), out of the box, the reference field to Busniess Services (cmdb_ci_service) is no longer listed in the table Incident (same applies for Problems or Changes) column list, replaced by a reference field to Business Applications (cmdb_ci_business_app). Besides, an Application Service may include a relationship to one or more Business Application (not to Business Services).
From Incident table columns list, Now Utah:

[CMDB Whisperer]

Guidance is that Application Service should be specified in the CI field, absent of any more specific information about the specific CI within the Application Service that is affected.  I don't disagree that it could still be useful to have a reference to Application Service, for better ease of reporting, but there is a place to reference the Application Service, per guidance of CSDM.  The business_service reference field is still there, you might have just missed that it was appropriately relabeled from Business Service to Service, along with the relabel of the cmdb_ci_service table itself, since Business Service is now a more specific subclass of Service.

I hadn't noticed that there is now a place for the Business Application to be added to an incident!  This goes against all of the guidance I had heard about this to date.  If I had to guess I would say this is aligned to changes coming in CSDM 5.0.  But in any case I think there will be some very happy customers, since this means you will now be able to track more general incidents related to the business application software that don't relate to a specific deployed instance of that application.  I haven't heard any specific guidance about the use of this field yet, so I'll have to dig deeper to get more context.

[Mark Bodman]

No, business Application is NOT supposed to be the subject of an Incident. 

To be clear, what I believe you are looking at is a related list to Business Application(s) that will get populated when the "Refresh Impacted Services" process is run.  You need to expose the related list, and you need to enable this extra step in Incident administration properties.

I provide a short overview in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbuHgr10P98&list=PLkGSnjw5y2U7QNr9jL6TAgwQvYBI_LEtK&index=14&t=3660s