Capture application group data
Because running applications usually constitute the largest part of IT spending, application portfolio governance is crucial to containing costs and to ensuring that the IT support to the business is consistent and reliable. Attaining answers to the following questions is critical to the maintenance of a healthy and cost-effective architecture as well as planning future operating models:
- Which applications should be retired?
- Which applications should be invested in?
- Which applications can be consolidated or optimized?
- Which applications are to be tolerated in the landscape but need observation?
- Which applications have risks that should be mitigated?
- Which applications need to have their lifecycles extended or reduced?
Alfabet FastLane allows you to evaluate and analyze applications in the context of various application portfolios in order to understand the technical and information architectures relevant to the applications, the use of the applications by the business as well as application costs, failure rates, and risks. You can logically structure and bundle the applications into application groups in order to assess the application portfolio. The evaluation of applications in application groups is based on preconfigured indicators used to evaluate the applications as well as analytics and business questions to help you to understand the usage, performance, and criticality of the application portfolio in the IT landscape.
Application portfolios are defined in Alfabet FastLane via application groups that bundle applications. Each application can be assigned to multiple groups. The applications should be bundled in application groups that are relevant to the goals for the portfolio assessment process. For example, applications could be logically structured in application groups according to:
- the high-level business processes that the applications support
- the organizations that the applications support
- the organizations that are responsible for the operation and maintenance of the applications
- the technology that the applications use
- or any other ad-hoc assessments of segments of the IT landscape
In the navigation panel, click Application Architecture > Application Groups to open the explorer and data workbench for application groups. Per default, the data workbench displays only a set of basic attributes. You can add more columns to capture other attributes directly in the data workbench or you can navigate to an application group's content area and define it in more detail there. Click to learn about how to use data workbenches.
Add an application group at the top-level of the hierarchy. Click the root node of the explorer and click the New button. The edit panel opens on the right where you can define basic data.
Add a subordinate application group. Click the parent application group in the explorer, go to the Overview page and open the Subordinate Application Group view. Click New > Create New Application Group.
Change the parent of an application group. In the Subordinate Application Groups view, click New > Move Existing Application Group Here to open a selector where you can chose the application group to move to the new parent application group.
Edit an application group. Edit the application group directly in the data table. Or select the checkbox 
for the application group you want to edit and click the Edit 
button to open the edit panel.
Define the application group's basic data. All mandatory fields must be defined to create the application group and save it.
- Name: (Mandatory) Enter a name for the application group. You can add an abbreviation (3-4 letters) of the name in the Short Name field to use in diagrams and other visualizations.
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Type: This attribute is optional and lets you specify a group type that is used for analysis in analytics dashboards and data workbenches. Possible values are:
- Project: Application group with applications used to achieve a milestone in a set amount of time. Application groups of type Project allow for KPI analysis of all grouped applications.
- Building Block: Application group with applications that are used to describe reference architectures of a specific solution.
- User Group: Application group with applications that are used by the same set of users in an organization.
- Icon: Choose an icon to visualize the location in diagrams and other visualizations.
- Authorized Access tab: The user who creates the application group is the authorized user per default. This can be changed. Select one or more authorized user groups that shall have write permissions to the object. All users in the authorized user group can edit the application group.
Applications must already be in the repository in order to assign applications to an application group. Some business questions in Alfabet FastLane can only be answered if the relationships between applications and application groups are defined. Click to find out how to capture application data.
Every application should be assigned to at least one application group in order to assess the applications in various contexts.
- Click the navigate
button of the application group to open the content area. - Go to the Application Portfolio page and scroll to the Applications view.
- Click New > Create an Application to add a new application to the application group or Add an Existing Application to add an application in the repository to the application group.
In Alfabet FastLane, responsibilities are documented via the concept of roles, whereby each role is based on a preconfigured role type or a custom role type defined by your company. In contrast to an authorized user who has read/write permissions, a person assigned a role for an asset will not have read/write permissions based on the role definition. The role is primarily for documentation purposes to provide information about stakeholders interested or responsible for the asset. If the user should have read/write permissions, they must either be the authorized user of the asset or assigned to an authorized user group associated with the asset.
Alfabet FastLane provides out-of-the-box role types that enable you to understand who is responsible for your IT assets in your IT portfolio. Additional role types that are relevant for your company can also be added.
Assigning users and organizations to roles is critical to understanding responsibility for assets in the IT and is required to answer the business question Who is responsible for our assets?
To define the users and organizations that have a role for an asset, click the navigate button of the asset you want to define. Go to the Overview page and scroll to the Responsibilities view and open it. Click in a column cell to open a selector to define a role for the asset. Depending on the role column, you may be able to select a person or an organization. Switch between Person or Organization in the selector.
A person can have one of the following roles or a custom role added by your company:
- Architect: A person who is responsible for the governance of the asset.
- Business Owner: A person or organization that owns the asset and is responsible for managing the functional requirements.
- IT Owner: A person or IT organization that owns the asset and thus typically responsible for approval decisions.
- Stakeholder: A person or organization that has an interest in the asset and therefore requires read-only access permissions.
An organization can have one of the following roles or a custom role added by your company:
- Business Owner: A person or organization that owns the asset and is responsible for managing the functional requirements.
- IT Owner: A person or IT organization that owns the asset and thus typically responsible for approval decisions.
- Operations: An IT organization responsible for the operations of the asset.
- Stakeholder: A person or organization that has an interest in the asset and therefore requires read-only access permissions.
A generic attribute enable you to capture custom information about an asset. Your portfolio administrator may have already created predefined custom attributes that the object class for the asset you are working with. If this is the case, the preconfigured generic attribute can be added to an asset.
For example, the generic attribute Rationalization Status could be configured to capture whether an application is in the scope of rationalization activities. Thus it would be assigned to the class Application with a default value set to False. As an authorized user of an application, you can add this attribute to your application and change the value if you want to.
To specify a generic attribute for an asset, navigate to the data workbench where the asset is defined. In the data table, click the navigate button of the asset you want to define. Go to the Overview page and scroll to the Generic Attributes view.
Add a preconfigured generic attribute to the asset. Click New > Add Generic Attributes from Class Configuration. Change the default value in the Value field as needed. The values that may be specified will depend on the type of property defined in the Type field.
Create a new generic attribute for the asset. Click New > Create New Generic Attribute. Define the following fields and click OK:
- Name: Enter a name that is easy for other users to understand.
- Type: Select the type of property that the generic attribute is. The field will display standard property types and enumerations. If you select an enumeration, the enumeration values will be displayed in the Value field.
- Value: Specify the attribute value for the selected object class. The values that may be specified will depend on the type of property defined in the Type field. Other users might copy this attribute. The value you define will be the default value but they will be able to change it for their asset.
Copy an existing generic attribute from an asset based on the same object class. Click New > Copy Existing Generic Attributes. In the selector, select the assets that have the generic attributes you want to copy to your asset and click OK. You can change the value as needed.
You can attach documents to objects in Alfabet FastLane in the Attachments view available in object profiles.
To define a generic attribute for an asset, navigate to the data workbench where the asset is defined. In the data table, click the navigate button of the asset you want to define. Go to the Overview page and scroll to the Attachments view and open it.
Upload a document to the asset. Click New > Add Document. Select the file from your local drive and click Upload. The document is displayed in the data table.
- Note that when you upload a document, you must ensure that the document is not encrypted. Encryption might be caused by Microsoft™ Information Protection. Only documents with the sensitivity label "Public" can be uploaded. Other reasons for encryption might also apply due to your company's security policies.
- The following file types are allowed: .xlsx, .doc, .docx, .ppt, .pptx, .pdf, .zip, .png, .jpg, and .json The following file types are not allowed: .exe, .bat, .cmd, .ps1, .txt, .xml, .wsdl, .html, .svg
Add a URL to the asset. You can define a URL for the selected object. The user must have access permissions to the document and have access to the network path specified in the link and, typically, be in the same network domain.
- Title: Enter a meaningful title for the URL link to help users understand why you included this URL with the selected object.
- URL: Enter a valid URL starting with the prefix https://www. or http://www. The URL link may contain up to 511 characters. The user’s Windows® environment must be able to identify the document extension and identify the correct application to open the document. A validation will be executed to ensure that a new URL is well-formatted and does not contain a period <.> without a leading or trailing blank space.
The following browsers support opening the files via the Web link definition in Alfabet FastLane: Microsoft® Internet Explorer® 11.0 and Microsoft® Edge® in conjunction with Windows® 10. Mozilla® Firefox® 24.0 or higher including Mozilla® Firefox® Quantum are also supported but require additional configuration in the browser settings.