Alfabet FastLane enables a single source of truth about the applications in your IT portfolio. All applications should be documented to ensure that the application portfolio is reliable to make good strategic decisions. As a user with the Portfolio Manager user profile, you can add new applications to the repository and maintain the data on applications that are already in the system.
In addition to describing an application by defining its attributes such as name and start date, you can also document the users who have a functional role for the application, the lifecycle of the application, and indicators relevant for evaluation of the application. Furthermore, you can capture information about the application's relevance for the business, such as the business capabilities that it supports or the business data that it exchanges with other applications.
The class model describes the object classes most relevant for maintaining the application portfolio.
Describe the business context for your application portfolio:
Document the business capabilities that your application portfolio supports.
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.
Describe the business processes that the applications in your application portfolio provide operational business support to.
business process
A business process is a set of activities that represent work required to achieve a business objective. Marketing services, selling products, delivering services, distributing products, invoicing for services, and accounting for money received are examples of business processes.
Describe the organizations in your company that rely on the applications in the application portfolio.
organization
An organization describes an administrative or functional unit in the enterprise.
Capture locations where physical servers are located that applications are running on.
location
A location is a geographic place that could be a country, city, building, or room, for example.
physical server
A physical server is a device that deploys applications and components. Virtual servers may run on physical servers that are located in different locations around the world.
Capture vendors that supply the technological components that applications use.
vendor
A vendor is a supplier of components.
component
A component is a reusable block of functionality that provides technical functionality to the application or to the platforms that an application runs on. Components do not usually provide functionality to end users. Typical components are operating systems, database management systems, or application servers.
Describe applications and create application portfolios:
Document the applications their application lifecycles and evaluate the applications based on preconfigured indicators.
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.
lifecycle
The lifecycle describes the planned schedule of a current real-world object in different lifecycle phases of a product. Lifecycle phases will be different depending on the object class. Lifecycle phases for an application are Pilot, Production, Retired, and Sunset.
Define the users and organizations that have a role for the application.
role
A role describes the functional relationship that a user or organization has for an object.
Specify the business capabilities that the application provides.
Specify the business processes that the application provides operational support to.
Specify the organizations that use the application.
Add application groups and assign applications to them.
application group
An application group bundles a set of applications for an analytical purpose. For example, an application group may be a portfolio of CRM applications to be analyzed. An application may be assigned to multiple application groups and can therefore be analyzed from many different perspectives.
Specify the technological components that the application requires to be operational.
Describe the information context of the application portfolio:
Document the information flows between applications.
information flow
An information flow describes the exchange of business data between source and target applications.
Document the business data that the information flows transfer.
business data
Business data is the information exchanged between applications or components. Business data is transferred by information flows.