Capture service group data

Because services often constitute a large part of IT spending, service portfolio governance is crucial to containing costs and to ensuring that the services that the business requires are consistent and reliable.

Service portfolios are defined in Alfabet via service groups that bundle business services and support services. Each business service and support service can be assigned to multiple service groups. The business services and support services should be bundled in service groups that are relevant to the goals for the portfolio assessment process.

Service groups can be analyzed in the following business question What is our service catalog?

Users with the user profiles Portfolio Manager, and Portfolio Admin can add and edit service groups in Alfabet. Click for an overview of permission concepts.

The license package Enterprise Architecture Management is required to work with service groups.

Add service groups to the repository

You can add a new service group from anywhere in the product via the orange New button in the header. Or go to Service Architecture > Service Groups:

Add a service 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. The Name attribute is mandatory.
Create a new service group as a child (subordinate) of this service group. Click the parent service group in the explorer, go to Overview > Subordinate Service Groups view. Click New > Create New Service Group.
Make an existing service group a child (subordinate) of this service group. Click the parent service group in the explorer, go to Overview > Subordinate Service Groups view. Click New > Move Existing Service Group Here. A selector opens where you can chose a service group and move it to this service group. The service group you chose is now a child of the service group you are working with.
Edit a service group. Edit the service group directly in the data table. Or select the checkbox for the service group you want to edit and click the Edit button to open the edit panel.
Navigate to the service group's content area.Click the Navigate button next to a service group to open its content area. Specify the service group's attributes as well as the relationships that the service group has to other assets in the repository.

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

Specify the service group's attributes

Once a service group is in the repository, you can define more details about the it in the Service Groups data workbench.

data workbench

A data workbench is a data table that allows you to capture, edit, and understand large amounts of data.

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 via the Structure column. Click to learn about how to use data workbenches.

Or you can select an individual service group in the data workbench and navigate to its content area and specify and analyze the service group in detail. In the data workbench, click the Navigate button to open the service group's content area. Go to the Overview page.

content area

A content area is a view with a collection of tabbed pages. Each page may have multiple content items such as cards and views. Every asset has a content area where the asset's attributes can be defined as well as other relevant views to capture information.

Define the service group's basic data.

Name: (Mandatory) Enter a meaningful name for the service group so that users understand its purpose.

Type: This attribute is optional and lets you specify if the group contains only business services or only support services. A service group may contain both types of services. The group type can be is used for analysis in analytics dashboards and data workbenches.

Parent Service Group: Specify the service group that is the parent of this service group in the service group hierarchy.

Description: Provide information about the service group so that other users understand its purpose.

Authorized Access tab: The user who creates the service 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 service group.
authorized user
An authorized user has primary responsibility to maintain the data for an object. Typically this is the user that has created the object. The authorized user as well as members of authorized user groups have write permissions to objects they are responsible for.
authorized user group
An authorized user group is a set of users that have been granted write permissions to an object. More than one authorized user group may be specified for an object.

Assign services to service groups for analysis

Business services and support services must already be in the repository in order to assign them to a service group.

Service groups logically structure and bundle the services and allow you to assess the service portfolio. You can assign business services and support services to multiple service groups in order to analyze your services from various perspectives.

Click the navigate button of the service group to open the content area. Go to Overview > Asset Grouping. In the Services field, enter the name of the business service or support service you want to assign to the service group. Or click in the field to open the selector and expand either the Business Service or Support Service section to select each service that you want to assign to the service group. Click outside of the selector to close it and update the Asset Grouping field.

Define responsibilities for a service group

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?.

Responsibilities are based on preconfigured role types. Your company may also configure custom role types via the Portfolio Admin user profile. Depending on the role type, a specified user and/or a specified organization may fulfill the responsibility for the service group. A user assigned responsibility via a role has read-only permissions to the service groups. To change data about the service group, they must also be specified as an authorized user or member of an authorized user group.

authorized user

An authorized user has primary responsibility to maintain the data for an object. Typically this is the user that has created the object. The authorized user as well as members of authorized user groups have write permissions to objects they are responsible for.

authorized user group

An authorized user group is a set of users that have been granted write permissions to an object. More than one authorized user group may be specified for an object.

Roles can be assigned to a service group in the Service Groups data workbench or the service group content area via Overview > Responsibilities.

Each role column represents the responsibility that a user or organization has for the service group. A person can have one of the following roles or a custom role added by your company:

Business Owner: A person or organization that owns the service group.

Service Owner: A person that is the subject matter expert for the service group from a functional or technical point of view.

Stakeholder: A person or organization that has an interest in the service group and therefore requires read-only access permissions.

Click a column cell to open a selector to define the role for the service group. Depending on the role column, the selector may have a section for both Person and Organization.

Expand the relevant section and select the person or organization to assign their role to the service group.