Capture location data

A location is a geographic place that could be, for example, a country, city, building, or even a room. Locations can be hierarchically defined. A physical server is assigned to a location, which represents the physical location. Documenting locations and their physical servers is critical for disaster recovery management.

Locations are structured in a hierarchy. Before you begin, you should think about how you want to document the hierarchy of locations. For example, you could document countries as level 1, cities as level 2, buildings as level 2, and rooms as level 4.

You can add a new location from anywhere in the product via the orange New button in the header. Or go to Business Architecture > Locations data workbench and click New > Location.

Try to capture as much information as possible about the location because complete data considerably improves the results of business questions and other analytics.

Once a location is in the repository, you can define more details about it in the Locations data workbench.

Per default, the data workbench displays a limited set of basic attributes. You can add more columns via the Structure column to capture other attributes directly in the data workbench.

Or specify and analyze the location in detail in its content area . In the data workbench, click the Navigate button for a location to open its content area > Overview page.

Define the location's basic data. Define the following fields and click Next to save your data. All mandatory fields must be defined to create the location and save it.

Specify the location's attributes

Ideally your company has documented its physical servers . Physical servers should already be in the repository in order to define the physical server that are available at your company's locations. Some business questions in Alfabet can only be answered if the relationships between physical servers and locations are defined.

    Every physical server should be assigned to a location in order to understand which IT infrastructure is at risk in case of an outage.

    1. In the navigation panel, click Technology Architecture > Physical Servers to open the data workbench for physical servers.​
    2. Go to Overview > Location and select the location for the physical server in the selector.
    3. Click outside of the selector to close it and update the Location field.

    In Alfabet, 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 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 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:

    An organization can have one of the following roles or a custom role added by your company:

    You can attach documents to objects in Alfabet in the Attachments view available in object profiles.

    To define document or URL for an asset, navigate to the data workbench where the asset is defined. In the data table, click the navigate 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.

    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.

    The following browsers support opening the files via the Web link definition in Alfabet: 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.

    The following business questions are relevant for the analysis of locations: