The Essential Project Forum

Hi,
What is the usual way to group applications?
We need a way to assign applications to domains or capabilities...


Thx for your help!
Wolfgang

Hi Wolfgang,

Could you expand a little on the question...

What is it you'd like to do when you say "group applications". How? For what purpose? Can you provide an example of what you might like?

Essential can group applications in many different ways. If you provide a little more detail on what you're trying to achieve then we'll try and steer you in the right direction!

Neil

Neil, thank you for your quick reply. In our current EAM tool we group applications by hierarchically structured business domains. E.g. A top level domain "loan" is divided into sub domains "loan sales" and "loan backoffice" to each of these sub domains there are several applications assigned to. So this is a way to structure our application landscape by a business perspective.
Greetings from Vienna!
Wolfgang

Hi Wolfgang,

The most structured approach we provide is to use the Application Capabilities in the Application Conceptual layer of the meta model.

Each Application Capability can be mapped to the business domain that it belongs to. The Application Capabilities typically have names that are quite like business processes in that we are focussing on WHAT application components we require to support the business processes.

We then map our Application Services to the Application Capabilities (realises Application Capabilities) to model WHAT that service does. The Application Services represent our logical / ideal applications and then we provide those Application Services with Application Providers which is the class that we use to capture the real applications/systems/integration solutions etc. that exist in our architecture.

We can then navigate the relationships from the Application Provider up to the Application Capability and then to the Business Domain to see which applications 'belong' to which domain and, importantly, where we may have conflicts where an Application Provider provides multiple capabilities that belong to different domains - such as is often the case with ERP systems.

An alternative, short-cut that doesn't provide the power to highlight potential domain conflicts could be to use a Taxonomy to more arbitrarily classify your Application Provider instances. The taxonomy meta classes are available as part of the Strategy Management Pack and are included in the version 3 baseline meta model, which will be released very shortly.

I think the Application Capability approach is probably the best but it would require a simple View to provide that Business Domain -> Application structure that you are looking for.
In terms of out of the box Views, there is one that shows all of the Business Capabilities by Business Domain with the supporting Applications listed. However, this is showing the domain classification of the Business Capabilities and Business Processes and then the supporting Applications (for those processes), which is not the same explicit categorisation of the Applications as you describe.

However, it would be interesting to compare this view with a view that showed the Applications to Business Domain mapping to explore the consistency!

Hope this helps

Jonathan

Jonathan,

I have several concerns with this approach:


1. The concept of "Business Domain" and "Application Capability" is quite overlapping - we dont want to use both.

2. Application Capabilities can not be hierarchically divided into Sub-Application Capabilities. Thus they can be used as the "lowest" structuring element for my applications only. So I can structure the top levels by "Business Domains" and the lowest by "Application Capabilities".

3. The approach is much too complex and leads to redundant concepts (your metamodel has "application"-"application provides" - "application services" - "application capabilities".... All I need are applicatons structured by something like domains or capabilities but not both.

4. We think that a small change in the meta model (Application Capabilities can be sub-divided into other Application Capabilities can fix this problem

What do you think about these issues?

Regards
Wolfgang

Hi Wolfgang,

I appreciate your concerns.

I think I understand where you are coming from on the Business Domain overlap but as Applications are about behaviour, we need the semantic grounding that the capabilities provide.

In terms of the Application Capability grouping / sub-dividing, the ability to describe containment between capabilities, e.g. App Capability 1 contains App Capability 2 and App Capability 3, would address this.

I'd like to explore this a bit more but at the moment, I agree that this would be a simple enhancement that should give you what you need.

Let me get back to you on the way forward, here.

Jonathan

Hi Wolfgang,

We've been looking into this and propose to update the meta model to:

• Add the ability to define containment relationships between Application Capabilities. This is something that is already available with other Capability classes, e.g. Business Capabilities, and so it is really something that we should already have had. This will enable you to do a functional decomposition or aggregation of the Application Capabilities and organise / structure them accordingly. Thanks for pointing this out!
• Modify the relationship between Application Capability and Business Domain, so that an Application Capability can be relevant to more than one Business Domain. The best way to think about the Application Capabilities are that these are the sort of behaviour / functionality that we are looking to automate.

As we've mentioned on a few posts, we are about to release a new major version of the tools - including a new version of the meta model, that extends and updates the current baseline version. I will get these updates into the new version as part of that release.

Thanks again for your feedback

Regards

Jonathan

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