Change Management - questions on alignment to CSDM (Business App vs App Service)

[Tom Sienkiewicz]

Hi Everyone,

I'm looking for best practice recommendations for setup of Change Management. I'm not sure if there is a general consensus in terms of what can go into the CI field.

I'm thinking if selecting Business Applications on a Change should be avoided or is generally okay.

As per CSDM, Business App is not considered an operational entity. On the other hand in the CHG documentation, it is mentioned that any kind of CI can be selected on a Change: Create a change request

While it is much more clear within Incident Management that Business App is not something that should go into the CI field, for CHG I do not have such certainty, especially if we consider different types of changes, e.g. for Infrastructure/Operational changes it is clear we would have a specific, operational CI, but if it is more of an Application kind of change, e.g. change some of the app configuration, possibly Business App makes sense as the change applies to all environments anyway?

So I'm looking for some feedback on how you might have approached this in your organization. Do you allow selecting Business Apps in the CI field or not? If you could provide some reasoning behind your approach that would be great.

Many thanks!

[Kieran Anson]

Hi there,

I would not have business application selectable on a change. Although the business application table is a class on the CMDB, I'd say that the statement you're referring to where a change can be aligned to "any CI" should read "any operationalised CI". 

Business applications are more a catalogue or a portfolio representation of tooling being used in the business. 

The business application should be realised via an application service and it's underlying infrastructure. 

If you align the application service as the CI on the change, SN has business rules already in place to populated the change related list for business applications effected 

[Tom Sienkiewicz]

Hey Kieran, thanks, appreciate your feedback.

The logic populating the impacted Business Apps related list, is this something that happens OOTB? I tried in my PDI but after creating a change with App Service selected (I made sure the App Service has a relationship to a Business App), the related list is empty. If you know the name of the script handling that, it would be great.

Another side question - have you seen implementations when one App Service is consumed by more than 1 Business App? Technically it seems doable to set it up like this but I believe the intention is for one App Service to be a physical representation of a single logical App? 

Many thanks!