Design & Planning domain in the CSDM model
Summarize
Summary of Design & Planning domain in the CSDM model
The Design & Planning domain in the Common Service Data Model (CSDM) supports enterprise architects and digital product owners in designing and planning digital products, whether purchased or internally built. This domain focuses on non-operational configuration items (CIs) used for strategic planning rather than incident, problem, or change management. It plays a key role in Application Portfolio Management (APM), helping organizations rationalize and manage business applications and related data.
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Key Features
- Core Tables: The domain includes the Business Capability, Business Application, and Information Object tables, each serving specific roles in modeling and planning business capabilities, applications, and data types.
- Business Capability: Represents high-level organizational capabilities critical to executing the business model, providing design guidance for implementing applications. These capabilities are often expressed as actionable tasks (e.g., Manage HR, Provide IT support).
- Business Application: Covers purchased or developed software supporting business capabilities. These applications relate directly to Application Services and have defined consumption relationships with operational service instances across environments (development, test, production) and geographies.
- Information Object: Describes the data types exchanged between business applications and databases, including sensitive data categories like PII, PCI DSS, and HIPAA. This helps in understanding data usage and compliance requirements.
- CI Relationships: The domain defines critical relationships such as Business Capability to Business Application (Provided By::Provides), Business Application to Business Service (Provided By::Provides), and Business Application to Service Instance (Consumes::Consumed By). These relationships support risk assessment, service evaluation, and strategic decision-making.
- Business Capability Hierarchy: Capabilities can be structured hierarchically up to six levels deep to map organizational functions accurately. Proper hierarchy management ensures clarity and prevents circular dependencies.
- Adding Business Applications: Users can manually create business applications and their relationships or import them from external sources, enabling comprehensive tracking of costs, usage, business value, and risks.
Key Outcomes
- Enables strategic alignment of IT investments with business capabilities through accurate modeling and relationship mapping.
- Supports rationalization and prioritization of business applications and services based on their contribution to business capabilities.
- Facilitates comprehensive visibility into application usage, environment deployments, and data flows, enhancing risk management and compliance.
- Provides a foundation for enterprise architects and product owners to make informed design and planning decisions that align with organizational goals.
- Improves the accuracy of service models by linking design-time elements with operational instances, aiding lifecycle management and reporting.
Enterprise architects and digital product owners work on the design and planning of digital products that your organization can either buy or build.
Tables in the Design & Planning domain
CIs in the Design & Planning domain aren’t operational, so you can’t select them for Incident Management, Problem Management, or Change Management.
- Business Capability [cmdb_ci_business_capability] table. Business Capability: A business capability is a high-level capability required by the organization to execute its business model. A business capability provides design guidance for implementing applications.
- Business Application [cmdb_ci_business_app] table. A business application is a purchased or internally-developed application that supports a business capability. A Business Application, ultimately, relates to an Application Service table and not any other type of Service Instance. For more information, see CI relationships in the CSDM.
- Information Object [cmdb_ci_information_object] table. An information object describes the type of data that is being interchanged between the business application and the database that serves it.
Tables used during the Design & Planning phase of the service life cycle
Relationships between CIs that support decision making
- Business capability Provided By::Provides Business application
- Business capability Provided By::Provides Business service (Service Consumption domain)
- Business application Uses::Used By Information object
- Business application (reference attribute) Business application
- Business application Contains::Contained By Agile development component (optional) (Build & Integration domain)
- Business application Consumes::Consumed By Service instance (Service Delivery domain)
- Relationship between a business capability and its supporting business applications
- This relationship supports visualization and reporting.
- A business capability has the Provided By::Provides relationship with its supporting business applications
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A business capability is a high-level capability that supports a business model or fulfills a mission for your organization.
A business capability typically describes a specific task that achieves one or more business outcomes. Business capabilities are often listed as verbs (for example, Manage HR, Manage financial data, or Provide IT support services). You can use business capabilities to rationalize and prioritize the cost of business applications and business services.
- A business application represents the software and infrastructure that provides a business function (for example, the titles catalog). Business applications are not strictly required, but they are strongly recommended because they increase productivity and perform other business functions such as accounts payables, accounts receivables, and general ledger. You can use APM to add any business application for which you must track costs, usage, business value, functionality, and risks.
- Relationship between a business application and the service instances
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A business application has Consumes::Consumed By relationships with service instances.
The relationship connects the record of the business application that is used in planning and design with where and how it’s realized operationally, represented by service instances. The relationship accounts for each use of a business application in the development, test, and production environments (dev, test, and prod service instances). Often there are multiple production deployments. For example, a large retailer uses a business application that runs a cash register in each of its 1,000 stores. There are therefore 1,000 production instances of the service instance — one per store — for that one business application. See the "CSDM in a nutshell" video for additional discussion of the relationship.
Business capabilities represented in a hierarchy
You can represent business capabilities in a hierarchy of a parent business capability and one or more lower-level (child) capabilities. Child capabilities (leaf nodes) are represented by numeric values: 1.0 for the parent and 2.0 through 6.0 for the leaf nodes. If you add, update, or delete a capability at a leaf node, be sure to update the levels of all the capabilities for the leaf nodes in that hierarchy, as applicable. If a business capability hierarchy requires more than six levels, divide the structure into multiple business capabilities.
Use the Business Capability form to create, modify, and extend business capabilities.
- If the parent capability is updated in the hierarchy, the levels of all its leaf node capabilities are recalculated.
- The total number of leaf node levels in a hierarchy can’t exceed six.
- When adding a capability, the hierarchy level is automatically assigned based on the parent capability level.
- You can delete only leaf node-level capabilities or capabilities without leaf node levels.
- Don’t create circular relationships. For instance, when creating a parent capability, a leaf node capability can’t be its parent.
Adding a Business application
A business application is a manually managed CI class that has a Consumes :: Consumed By relationship with a service instance. You must therefore manually create required relationships to CIs (for example, with instances of the service instances in use). Creating relationships also enables you to relate business applications to infrastructure CIs such as databases and web servers. If needed, you can integrate or connect two or more business applications to establish their relationship.
- Environments (for example, Development, Test, or Production).
- Geographies (for example, the Americas or the Asia Pacific Japan [APJ])
- Regions (for example, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa [EMEA]).
Use either of the following methods to add a business application:
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Import the list of applications from a spreadsheet or third-party tool. To import data, define a data source and a transform map and then run or schedule an import.
- Use the Business Application form.
Information object
- An information object is a CI that displays and describes the information (or type of data) that the application receives from the database. Information objects are part of the information portfolio and are referenced by the business application. An information object has a Used By::Uses with a business application.
- Information objects are mapped to the information object [cmdb_ci_information_object] table.
- You can use the information object table to identify the types of data that a business application uses, including highly sensitive data such as:
- Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
- Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) data
- Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) data