Mapping Technical Services to Application Services

[MirandaP]

We are getting ready to map our Application Services to our Technical and Business Service Offerings, using the Application Service Wizard. One thing that has been confusing, is when using the application service wizard are we mapping Technical Services offerings that underpin / help deliver the Application Service, or are we selecting Technical Service Offerings that the application Service delivers?

I believe the answer is the first one, for example we have a TSO For "Cloud Services Management", which could be mapped to the application service when the application utilizes cloud infrastructure, but I wanted to confirm as I keep seeing conflicting responses. If this is the case, how do we map technical service offerings that the application service delivers?

Thank you for any guidance!

[Michael Dul · Accepted solution]

Hello Miranda,

First I wanted to mention that the below is taken from my experience and that CSDM is about consistency. My answer will go toward the textbook answer but your use cases may be different and as long as you have data integrity you can drive different insights from the same data model. Having said that, this is an outline that I use.

Technical Service Offerings "deliver" technology and its outcomes are consumed within value streams through that technology. This is why you will often see that they are published "to other Service Owners" almost like building blocks to construct your Business Services and Offerings. As the Wizard is looking for a CSDM association which is "contains::contained by" relationship it is asking for the Offering that "delivers" that Application, you can think of this in the pure way as "Support Offering".

You can have other Technical Offerings that are relevant to support this application, like the Cloud Services Management example you provided. For example an offering that looks after (or delivers) servers that this application is hosted on, but those would be related to appropriate CIs (very often through the dynamic CI groups). They can be linked to other offerings but the exact guidance on those is to say the least, patchy, and is not represented within Application Wizard.

Now to the value streams. Application Service "delivers" technical (and in turn business) outcomes that should be represented or aggregated within Business Service Offerings. This is why those have the relationship of "used by::depends on" and those are the offerings that this application "delivers".

Too Long Didn't Read Answer...

Neither, it is looking for the Support Offering (Technology Offering) for this Application Service.

Hope this helps.

Best Regards,

Michael

[MirandaP]

Hi Michael,

Thank you, the distinction of delivers vs supports helps a lot! This has me feeling more confident in proceeding with mapping our App services to TSO and BSO.

Best,

Miranda