Most of these definitions for a business application are nice, but for me the issue is around where do you draw the line of what is a technical application (which I know is not in the CSDM definition). 

Business applications are not physical discoverable Ci's. It's a made up entity. However, what's deployed as the application are technical components: Code, databases, services, batch jobs, etc. Each of these can have their own Ci. Relating all these components (Ci's) to a business application in the CSDM model, is a challenge for us. Our configuration team has been creating technical apps in some cases, because it's not something used directly by business user, and it's owned by infrastructure teams (example: Mulesoft APi gateway, or IBM IFG (file gateway), or even some Hipaa transactions that are deployed as standalone Ci's. 

Having a hierarchy in CMDB to show a business app and the components it is comprised of, would be great. Some of those components are shared components, like an enterprise service used by many other business applications. If someone has a real tangible description on how to lay all this out, I would love to have a conversation with you, and so would our configuration mgt team. Interested to see if anyone out there has been able to clearly show business apps, the Ci's that make up those business apps and what type of CI's those components are in the CSDM.