Capture business service data

Support services are technological activities, processes, or solutions offered by a service provider to support a business service. They are delivered by components, virtual servers, or physical servers. Examples of support services are hosting of IT capabilities, first-level support, or network administration.

Support services should be well defined, advertised in a service catalog, priced or costed, and measured for consumption. Each support service may have one SLA (service level agreement) assigned to it.

Support services can be analyzed in the following business questions:

  1. What is our service catalog?
  2. What is our service landscape?
  3. What is our service roadmap?
  4. What are our service overlaps?
  5. Where do we have SLA violations?

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

The license package Enterprise Architecture Management is required to work with support services.

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

  • Click New > Support Service.
  • Click the Navigate  Navigate button next to a support service to open its content area. Specify the support service's attributes as well as the relationships that the business service has to other assets in the repository.

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

Once a support service is in the repository, you can define more details about the it in the  Support Services data workbench.

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 support service in the data workbench and navigate to its content area and specify and analyze the support service in detail. In the data workbench, click the Navigate  Navigate button to open the business service's content area. Go to the Overview page.

Define the support service's basic data.

  • Name: (Mandatory) Enter a meaningful name for the support service that is known by the users in your enterprise.
  • Version: Enter a version number for the support service.
  • Status: This is an approval status and typically indicates the level of quality of the information about the support service. The release status determines whether a support service can or cannot be deleted. Possible values are:
    • Draft: The support service has only mandatory data defined.
    • Under Review: The support service is documented and being reviewed. A support service with this release status cannot be deleted.
    • Approved: The support service has been approved by the responsible stakeholders. A support service cannot be deleted when it has an approved release status. A business service with this release status cannot be deleted.
    • Data imported: The data regarding this support service has been imported from an external system. Additional changes may be required to improve the data quality. A business service with this release status can be deleted.
    • Trash: The support service is no longer valid and can be deleted.
  • Provider: The organization that provides the support service. Every business service should have a provider defined.
  • Authorized User: The user who creates the support service is the authorized user per default. This can be changed.
  • Authorized User Groups: Select one or more authorized user groups that shall have write permissions to the support service. All users in the authorized user group can edit the business service.

Define the lifecycle attributes.

  • Start Date and End Date: The start and end date captures the support service's planned start and end dates. These dates should be defined so that they begin before and end after the start/end dates of the applications, deployments, and support services that deliver the business services. Click the calendar icon to select the date or enter the date in the date format Month/Day/Year. For example: 4/30/2026
  • Object State: The object state describes the use of the support service in the real world. This can be understood as the operational status of the support service. Possible values are:
    • Plan: The support service is proposed to be used and still in the stages of planning and building.
    • Active: The support service is currently being used. The active period begins with the support service's start date and stops with the end date.
    • Retired: The support service is no longer used.
  • Strategic Service: Select the checkbox if the support service is strategic for the company.
  • Successor: The next support service that will follow this support service version.

Service groups must already be in the repository in order to assign the support service to a service group. Click to find out how to capture service group data.

Service groups logically structure and bundle the support services and business services relevant for a service portfolio. You can assign the support service to multiple service groups in order to analyze your business services and their support services from various perspectives.

Click the navigate Navigate button of the support service to open the content area. Go to Overview > Asset Grouping. In the Service Groups field, enter the name of the service group you want to assign the support service to. Or click in the field to open the selector and select each service group that you want to assign the support services to. Click outside of the selector to close it and update the Asset Grouping field.

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 support service. A user assigned responsibility via a role has read-only permissions to the business service. To change data about the business service, they must also be specified as an authorized user or member of a n authorized user group.

Roles can be assigned to a support service in the Support Services data workbench or the support service content area via Overview > Responsibilities.

Each role column represents the responsibility that a user or organization has for the support service. 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 support service.
  • Business Owner: A person or organization that owns the support service and is responsible for managing the functional requirements.
  • IT Owner: A person or IT organization that owns the support service and thus typically responsible for approval decisions.
  • Service Owner: A person that is the subject matter expert for the support service from a functional or technical point of view.
  • Stakeholder: A person or organization that has an interest in the support service 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 support service and is responsible for managing the functional requirements.
  • IT Owner: A person or IT organization that owns the support service and thus typically responsible for approval decisions.
  • Operations: An IT organization responsible for the operations of the support service.
  • Stakeholder: A person or organization that has an interest in the support service and therefore requires read-only access permissions.
  1. Click a column cell to open a selector to define the role for the support service. Depending on the role column, the selector may have a section for both Person and Organization.
  2. Expand the relevant section and select the person or organization to assign their role to the support service.

An SLA (service level agreement) defines an agreement between the service providers and consumers about the standards that the support service is obligated to meet. Every business service and support service should have a service level agreement.

  1. Go to the content area of the support service. Click the button SLA > Create Service Level Agreement.
  2. In the editor, specify a name for the service level agreement. Specify also the amount of time the support service should be available in the Service Uptime field as well as when it is available in the Service Validity field. Click OK to save the data and close the editor.
  3. In the Overview page, click the name of the SLA in the Service Level Agreement field to open its content area.
  4. In the Evaluation view, specify values for the following indicators:
    • Availability: The amount of time that the service is available for use by consumers during the defined uptime hours.
    • Backup Frequency: The frequency guaranteed by the service provider to back up the service data.
    • Responsiveness: The average time that it takes for an issue to be answered by the service desk of the service provider.
    • Security Breach Alert: The number of hours that the service provider has to alert its customers who consume the service of a security breach of the organization's data.

The business question Where do we have SLA violations? examines the service level agreements for business services and their support services and compares the indicators of the SLAs. The visualization highlights where support services do not provide enough support to the business service and where violations are occurring with service level agreements.

At any point in time, you can check the data quality of the support service you are defining to see where gaps exist.

In the data table, click the navigate Navigate button of the support service you want to define. Go to the support service's content area > Data Quality > Data Quality Details. Expand the table in order to review the data quality issues. Click the link in the Resolution column to navigate to the location where you can correct the data quality issue.