These business questions address information regarding responsibility and accountability for IT assets and where to focus your change efforts.
What should we be focusing on?
The business question What should we be focusing on? looks at the applications that are most important for the business and helps you to understand which applications to invest in and areas of possible divestment. The analytics help you to understand where applications support business capabilities that are relevant vs. those that are not relevant for the business, and whether to invest, migrate, or divest in applications based on the business relevance of the business capabilities they support.
application
An application is a complete installation of a software offering a functionality to an end user. The application might consist of or require other technical components to run.
business capability
A business capability is a high-level description of what is done in a company to meet its business objectives. Market development, product development, and support and services are examples of business capabilities.
Who is responsible for our assets?
The business question Who is responsible for our assets? enables your company to understand the users and organizations that have a functional role for each asset in the IT portfolio. This information is critical to close the gaps in your data and identify the relevant users to correct data quality issues.
user
A user is a person with a license to Alfabet FastLane. Users are bundled in user groups, which determines the access permission to an object.
organization
An organization describes an administrative or functional unit in the enterprise.
role
A role describes the functional relationship that a user or organization has for an object.
asset
An asset is a general term to describe an IT artifact captured in the data repository. In Alfabet FastLane, assets are objects based on object classes. Assets in the data repository include applications, application groups, business capabilities, business data, business processes, components, data categories, information flows, IT capabilities, locations, organizations, physical servers, virtual servers, and vendors.
In Alfabet FastLane, responsibilities are documented via the concept of "roles". Each role is based on a preconfigured role type or a custom role type defined by your company.
role type
A role type is a configured prototype that describes a functional role that users or organizations can have for an object class. Every role defined for an object is based on a configured role type.
Preconfigured role types are available out-of-the-box.
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Application Manager: A person who is the subject matter expert for the application from a functional and technical point of view.
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Architect: A person who is responsible for the governance of the asset.
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Asset Owner: A person or organization who legally owns the asset. These users and organizations are responsible for making asset allocation decisions based on strategic and operational objectives.
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Business Owner: A person or organization who owns the asset and is responsible for managing the functional requirements.
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Capability Owner: A person who is responsible for the business capability/IT capability.
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IT Owner: A person or IT organization owning the asset and thus typically responsible for approval decisions.
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Operations: An IT organization responsible for the operations of the asset.
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Project Manager: A person who is responsible for planning, organizing, managing, and executing projects from beginning to end including the project's budget, resources, and scheduling.
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Staffing Manager: A person who is responsible to allocate and balance the human resources required for a project.
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Stakeholder: A person or organization that has an interest in the assets and therefore requires read-only access permissions.
This business question provides information about the responsibilities for all relevant assets in your repository to find gaps in responsibilities and initiate mitigations. You should review the information for each object class to understand how many assets have an “owner” specified and who is responsible for a specific application or component. By diligently reviewing and maintaining the responsibilities for the assets in your company, you can establish a single source of truth for all responsibilities to quickly find the right contacts when making decisions about which assets to keep and which to retire. The business question Who is responsible for our assets? allow to track and take action if the information about responsibilities is incomplete so that you can move closer to a desirable data governance completeness score.
What are our technology standards?
The business question What are our technology standards? provides insights to the technology portfolio and enables you to assess whether components are aligned with the company's standards catalogs. Insight about the use of components by the applications ensures that you understand the business importance of the technologies. Promoting standards and reducing the use of non-standard technologies ensures efficiency in IT capabilities and reduces IT costs.
component
A component is a reusable block of functionality that provides technical services and/or business functionality to the applications or platforms using it. An operating system, database management system, or application server are examples of components that an application typically requires.
IT capability
An IT capability bundles and structures content-specific components necessary for the IT infrastructure of data center operations. Mainframe operations, database management, and backup and recovery procedures are examples of IT capabilities.
Who owns which applications?
The business question Who owns which applications? provides information about the organizational ownership of applications and helps you to understand the responsibilities of business and IT organizations for application portfolio.
The best-practice recommendation is that a business owner and IT owner are documented for every application. The doughnut charts provide information about the percentage of applications that organizations own as business owners and IT owners. Applications with no or partial organization ownership are identified so that risk can be mitigated before it occurs. Well-documented asset ownership supports management of the IT portfolio and ensures that the IT is prepared for governance, risk, and compliance audits (GRC) as well as compliance with various enterprise risk management frameworks ERMF).