Capture organization data

An organization describes an administrative or functional unit in the enterprise such as business units, divisions, regions and countries. An organization is not typically a legal entity but rather a business-driven governance structure to document roles and responsibilities and track roll-out plans. Organizations are supported in their business activities through the business support provided by applications.

Organizations form a self-referential hierarchy. An organizational hierarchy of 3 levels is sufficient for analysis in Alfabet.

Organizations are structured in a hierarchy. Before you begin, you should think about how you want to document the hierarchy of organizations.

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

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

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

  • Name: (Mandatory) Enter a name for the organization. You can add an abbreviation (3-4 letters) of the name in the Short Name field to use in diagrams and other visualizations.
  • Short Name: (Recommended) Enter a short name of 3-4 letters that can be used for the description in diagrams and other visualizations.
  • Contact: (Recommended) Specify a person who is the contact person in the organization. The contact person must be a user in Alfabet.
  • Organization Type: (Recommended) Specify whether the organization is internal or external to your company.
  • Organization Scope: (Recommended) If you have selected External for the Organization Type attribute, specify whether the external organization is a solution partner, reseller partner, service provider, or technology provider.
  • Authorized Access tab: The user who creates the organization 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 organization.

Ideally your company has documented its application . Applications should already be in the repository in order to define the applications that an organization uses. Some business questions in Alfabet can only be answered if the relationships between applications and organizations are defined.

Organizations are supported in their business activities by the business support provided by applications. For each application, you should specify the organization that uses it in order to understand the operational support in the company.

  1. Go to the content area of the organization.
  2. Go to Application Context > Used Organizations and select the d.
  3. Click outside of the selector to close it and update the Used Organizations 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:

  • 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.

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.

  • 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 asset 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: 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.