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How to record the same application used by multiple departments in a large company

PeterCool
New Contributor

I'm curious how others have used Hopex to inventory a single application that is used differently by different departments within the same large organization.   Same exact technical application (built-in-house or purchased) but with different responsible CIOs, different data in/out etc.

Do you create separate application records? and if so, what names do you give each application?  How do you enforce a consistent naming convention?

4 Replies

@BenAvdicevic  totally agree!   Salesforce should be in the tech catalog (TPM) and "Customer Relationship Management System" is the application that is built on or depends on SF.    Currently we would have 2 entries for CRMS using the naming convention of "CRMS UK" and "CRMS US" (because our"Business Line" field is not aligned with these divisions of the company.  

@PeterCool 

Imagine you use Salesforce as your CRM system in your organization.   Then, an appropriate name for the Business Application in HOPEX might be "Customer Relationship Management System".   IMHO, "Salesforce" is not a good choice for an application name because it includes vendor technology in the name - it confuses the application with the underlying technology.

PeterCool
New Contributor

@BenAvdicevic thank you very much for the reply.  I intentionally kept my question simple and targeted and you provided some very useful answers.    We use Business Line and Application Installations but we don't yet use the Business Capability Model.   

If we have 2 Business Lines (for a simple example) and they both used the same application, what would you recommend using as the application name?   Or would you keep the application name the same and just use the Business Line to differentiate.     Our organization tends to treat the application-name as the "primary key" for reporting on our inventory.  We can change this mindset but just curious on the best approach.

BenAvdicevic
Honored Contributor

@PeterCool There is a lot of complexity hiding behind that simple question.  I'll try to give you few answers based on my organization's usage of HOPEX.

You asked "how to inventory single application, used by different departments?"  You suggested perhaps maintaining separate application objects - presumably one for each department.

We don't do that -  we inventory a single Business Application and then create different mappings to show how different departments use that application.

Business Lines

Now, an Application object can be linked to a "Business Line" object.   We do that.    So, we can very easily indicate that a single application is serving multiple departments (i.e. multiple business lines).  You will find the Business Line link in the Characteristics tab of the Properties page of the Application object.

Application Installations (we don't use this - but it is available and seems to address your question)

Each Application record in hopex can have a defined Installation.  You can define things like:

  • Hosting Location
  • Deployment Support
  • Owned Usage Context
  • Consumer (i.e. department)

Exhibited Business Capabilities

Lastly, if you have a Business Capability Model at your org - you can use the Enterprise object to setup a dedicated Business Capability map for each business segment.   Than, you can map applications to business capabilities for each segment separately.    

Hopefully this gives you some ideas of what is possible.   Like I said - you asked a simple question - but the answer depends on the context and specific details of what you need. 😉