Relating an Application Provider to a Business Unit (Actor)

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edpetit
Posts: 3
Joined: 10 Feb 2014, 22:16

Hi,
I've got a list of application providers that are used by various business units throughout the enterprise. Since the company grew through acquisition, it has several different ERP systems. I want to reflect that these application providers (actually composite application providers as they have modules within them) are used by some business units and not others. I've set up my business units as group actors. How do I go about relating the two? Thanks!

Ed
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neil.walsh
Posts: 444
Joined: 16 Feb 2009, 13:45
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Hi,

There are two ways to relate Application Providers to Group Actors depending on how mature the rest of your EA model is.

The first approach uses the Stakeholder slot to make a simple mapping between the two. Create a Business Role called "Application User" or similar and create Stakeholders that map Group Actors to the role "Application User". This is a quick an simple way to make an unsophisticated relationship between these two objects.

In the second approach relate Application Providers to Group Actors via a Physical Business Process. A Physical Business Process is
An instance of a Business Process that is performed by a group or individual in the enterprise.
This allows us to specify not just what Application is being used but also what for. This is useful if you've already made some progress defining processes or you're happy to define processes as you go (even if they're dummy ones for now). It's a very powerful approach that enables you to define contextual information on how the user is "using" the application. That said, it's a lot more effort and depends very much whether you have access to information about how the applications are being used.

So... From an Application Provider, you add a new "Supported Business Process", and then on the resulting form you specify a new Business Process. This will call up the form for a Physical Business Process. From here you relate a Business Process to an Organisation and optionally to Application, Information, Location and more.

Let me know if this helps and if you have any more questions, feel free to post back.

Thanks

Neil
edpetit
Posts: 3
Joined: 10 Feb 2014, 22:16

Thanks so much! This was exactly what I was looking for, as we hadn't developed out all of the business processes as of yet.

Ed
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neil.walsh
Posts: 444
Joined: 16 Feb 2009, 13:45
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Happy to help!
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