Mapping Business Application to Business Application in CSDM

ctsmith · ‎05-18-2022

I'm working on building out our Workday Business App around the CSDM model. I have mapped Workday as the core business app that provides our core Human Resource capability. But, there are sub business applications running on Workday (Workday FIN, Workday Payroll, etc.). CSDM white paper references relationships between business applications but the examples given don't match. Is it provides::provided by relationship between business applications or "uses reference attribute"? If the later... how do you build "uses reference attribute" relationship.

Also, are my business applications in reverse? Should all the sub business apps provide the business capability?

Screenshots provided. Our Workday relationships, CSDM 4.0 suggested relationships, ServiceNow Example

Aaron W_ Smith · ‎05-18-2022

Christopher,

What the CSDM is referring to is driven by the Field "Architecture type" not the Relationships held in [cmdb_rel_ci]. If you have a Business Application configured as type = Platform Host - in your case Workday

- then on the other Business Application records you would set Architecture type to = Platform Application. When you do an additional mandatory field "Platform Host" will appear where you can select your Workday record.

View solution in original post

ctsmith · ‎05-19-2022

@Aaron W. Smith and Tobias (too many Tobias' to 'at' you), would you say the connection between business capability and the business application is at the platform host or platform app level? Or both? It looks like in the SN example the platform apps provide the capabilities? Does that sound right? The platform applications provide the capability and the applications run on the host application that consumes the production application service (or do the platform applications also consume the production application service?). Sound about right?

ctsmith · ‎05-19-2022

Is this a better representation of relationships?

PG2 · ‎05-20-2022

Very interesting! Can I expand the question and ask what this means for the underlying Application Services?

Would it be valid to have an Application Service for each "sub-application"?

Tobias · ‎05-23-2022

Hi @Christopher Smith @PG

I would recommend looking at this example video from servicenow - where there are multiple examples of how this is mapped CSDM Example Series: Platforms - YouTube

A side note to this: if you have just started your CMDB journey I would be cautious spending to much time mapping out capabilities and focus more on application services and "below". Everything above application services quickly becomes a question of abstraction level/how much detail you want to put in- and the question is of course what do you need/who are you helping.

In the CSDM whitepaper there are some recommendations on what to focus on at different stages of CMDB journey which might be useful.

/Tobias

ctsmith · ‎05-24-2022

Thanks, Tobias, I'll give the video a watch. As far as our CMDB journey just starting... na, this is just a first stab for me at CSDM with a non-Discoverable enterprise cloud app. I implemented Discovery last year with a combination of IP schedules, Cloud, and various service graph connectors and set up our CMDB management and stakeholder regime. But I've had this in my backlog for... 1/2 a year to try a CSDM modeling around our enterprise apps and I thought Workday would be a good first take since our Workday engineers will be doing changes, approving requests, and handling incidents around Workday and they needed a CI to work off of and I didn't want to just throw it in the generic application class.