Methodology and the class model

In the user interface and Help, the term "asset" is synonymous with the term "object" and is used to reflect the business perspective of a company's IT assets.

MM_MM_4Beginner 

At the center of Alfabet are applications which are products that provide the business with functionality. The application has relationships to other assets in IT.

MM_4BeginnerExample 

CRM CSS is an application for customer relationship management and customer self- service. The CRM CSS application enables the company's mission critical business capabilities Contact Management and Sales Management and the organization Marketing and Sales use the application CRM CSS to fulfill their business objectives. The application transfers the business data Customer, Benefit, and Claim Payment to other applications via information flows. The components Apache Web Server, Oracle Database, Red Hat Enterprise Linux,and Microsoft Internet Explorer are used to build the application CRM CSS.

An application supports the business to fulfill its high-level business objectives, referred to as business capabilities . Whether your company captures how applications support business capabilities or business processes will depend on your company's methodology. Organizations use applications to fulfill the business's objectives. Further, the application transfers business data to other applications via information flows . Many technological components such as operation systems, databases, and web servers are used to build the application.

The data captured in Alfabet is based on a class model. Every object is an instance of an object class. Every object will have attributes and references to other objects.

MM_ClassAttributes 

For example, an application is an instance of the class Application. An object will have many standard attributes that describe the object. For example, an application has a set of standard attributes that include Name, Version, Start Date, and End Date. Applications have many more standard attributes that allow the application to be described in rich detail. Some of the attributes will be references to objects in other classes. An application may also have roles , indicator types , and extended attributes defined. For example, the class Application has a reference to the class Application Group, which indicates that the application belongs to the application group.