Business IT Architecture Management: building the business function library

Consulting Services Business IT Architecture Management: building the business function library Business functions are used in the methodology to represent how IT supports business units and to identify synergies, redundancies and system consolidation potential. They are used to formulate business demands in IT terms and are the starting point for transformation of the application landscape to a service oriented architecture (SOA). A business function is a general description of a business activity. They are described irrespective of associated business processes and technologies. They can be required and called upon by various business processes and made available via several applications. © alfabet AG, 2005 1 Service Offering In order to route and perform an analysis of the business function library the following steps are required: 1. Iterative definition of business function library 2. Mapping and evaluation of the existing processes and applications to the business function library 3.Analysis and Identification of the action items To achieve these steps alfabet offers the following services to organizations: Building the business function library • Prepare and conduct workshops and interviews with relevant Figure 1: Business function Library with a portfolio analysis of all applications that can provide a certain stakeholders to set up the business function library function • Provide a structured representation of the business function library • Iterative consolidation and refinement of the business function library Mapping to the business architecture • Documentation of the relevant business processes, business objects and organizational structures • Documentation of the relevant application portfolio • Create associations and evaluate the existing and required functional support delivered by the application systems Analysis and Identification of action areas • Identify the action items based on analyses of applications, Figure 2: Business support analysis, showing all redundancies, process support and costs functions required by business processes as well as the • Prioritise the weak points for decision making and further applications that implement them planning Benefits • Transparency of IT landscape and the supported processes • Identification of functional overlaps in business support provided by existing applications, as well as areas where IT support is inadequate • Set up of business function library as the starting point for transformation to a service oriented architecture (SOA) © alfabet AG, 2005 2