Methodology and the class model

At the center of Alfabet are applications which are products that provide the business with functionality. The application has relationships to other assets in IT.

An application supports the business to fulfill its high-level business objectives, referred to as business capabilities . Whether your company captures how applications support business capabilities or business processes will depend on your company's methodology. Organizations use applications to fulfill the business's objectives. Further, the application transfers business data to other applications via information flows . Many technological components such as operation systems, databases, and web servers are used to build the application.

The data captured in Alfabet is based on a class model. Every object is an instance of an object class . Each object will have attributes and references that describe its characteristics in the IT landscape. An overview of classes describes the basic attributes and references that can be captured for each object class.

In the example above, an application is an instance of the class Application. An object will have many standard attributes that describe the object. For example, an application has a set of standard attributes that include Name, Version, Start Date, and End Date. Applications have many more standard attributes that allow the application to be described in rich detail. Some of the attributes will be references to objects in other classes. An application may also have roles , indicator types , and extended attributes defined. For example, the class Application has a reference to the class Application Group, which indicates that the application belongs to the application group.