Tracking locations using a business application & what capabilities

[Philip Hulshize]

Our business is collecting all applications used at a location, and the capabilities being used.

Once done, the desire is to understand what locations are using these business applications, and I am struggling where to store this data.

Some things to consider:

• An ERP system may have only one deployment but be used at hundreds of locations
• Each location can (and do) use different capabilities from that ERP system

How would we tie the App and the capabilities to a location?

[CMDB Whisperer]

First, the business application itself may or may not be specific to a location, based on your organization.  The underlying product that the business application uses may be the same, but in some cases they may be independently managed as business applications that serve different business processes.  For example, Confluence may be stood up as an IT Wiki and separately as a customer-facing knowledge repository.  Those could be managed as two different business applications even though they both use Confluence.  Decisions around how the software product is used for those business capabilities could be made independently.  So if there are separate business applications in this scenario and they are specific to locations, then in theory they could be associated with different business capabilities as well.  That said, this is not the most common case, and probably not what you are looking for.

Another possibility, in case of your ERP example, is that the business application could follow a platform hosting architecture model, in which case it could be broken down into individual business applications which are hosted on the ERP platform, and this will also give you a different method of stratifying your business capabilities.

But let's assume the more common case holds true, i.e. that you are using a single business application that provides multiple capabilities, and that it is the only business application that utilizes the underlying software product, but individual locations may use different capabilities.  The next question is whether the business application is deployed in multiple locations.  If they are, there should be separate Application Services which represent the individually deployed instance of the business application.  In theory this could provide some additional insight, based on how those application services are configured.  But ultimately, they are still related a single business application that provides multiple business capabilities, so this does not help identify which business capabilities are being provided by that application at specific locations.

So where do you get this information?  The next part is the key: via the Service Offerings.  The application services, whether or not they are deployed at specific locations, are associated to Service Offerings, which can be and often are location-specific offerings.  And these offerings offer a second path to the business capability, via the parent Business Service (and in theory via the Technical Service as well, even though that is not part of the CSDM 4.0 specification). 

For example, let's say you have an Global ERP System that has Finance and HR modules and related business capabilities defined.  In the US they leverage both the Finance and HR capabilities provided by this Global ERP System via the US-specific offerings of the Finance Management and Human Resources business services.  In the UK, they also have a UK-specific offering that uses the Global ERP System.  However, for the UK-specific HR capabilities, they use a different business application, UK HR System. 

So bottom line, if you follow the path from the Business Application to the Application Service that is being used by location-specific Service Offerings, and you associated the Business Capabilities with the parent Business Services as prescribed by CSDM, this will give you a view into which Business Capabilities provided by a business application are being leveraged by different locations.

[Stig Brandt]

Hi Philip

In ServiceNow, there is no directly way to "subscribe" to an Business Application", as the CSDM model is basic, so here is how I would do it, to keep it simple: 

• Create an application model -> Business Application
• Create a Business Service -> Link the Application Model to -> Business Service
• Create an Offering -> Link the Application Model -> to the offering
• From the offering - subscribe - locations to the Offering on the related list on the offering form.
•  

In Digital Portfolio Management Workspace - you will also easy see all locations subscribed to the "Service"

In reports - you can filter on Application Model and get all relevant data for your application. etc.

[Geoff Lamb]

We have added additional fields in APM for a Business Application that are manually set at creation time and 'attested' annually. We are a bank and operate in over 30 countries with different regulators and regulations. So we care where the users are and where the data/operations are. We might end up doing some jiggery pokery at the App Service layer to auto-populate physical location - but it is not a trivial task. 

We have different 'modules' as separate business applications (mostly) using architecture type to tie them together.

We have added:

• User type: (internal, customer, both)
• Business Geography
• Operating Jurisdiction