In Evolver, an application system is considered a software program or business application that causes a computer to perform useful tasks beyond the running of the computer itself. An application performs certain business activities or tasks to deliver a business capability. An example of an application would be “Financial System”, “Inventory System” or “Patient Record System”. The application system and its components/modules must be defined independently of any software and vendor because in your organization there could be multiple software products to support the same application system. The application system object category is used to logically group application systems. The output of the application modeling is also called Application Reference Model (ARM). An ARM establishes a common vocabulary and structure for describing the application systems. It is important to provide good terms and description for the applications which is easily understandable by many different stakeholders.  

An application system may consist of a group of software programs, for example, the “Financial System” may be built upon Oracle Financial software product and SAP financial software product. An application can be broken down into application modules or components. For example, you can have an application called Financial System, which may have sub-applications such as:

  1. Asset Management
  2. Payable Management
  3. Receivable Management
  4. Budget Management
  5. General Ledger Management

The financial System application hierarchy may look like below in the Designer.
application 1

Each application or sub-application is deployed on particular software versions. The object Application versions keep track of your software products and its versions. You can define software products at the folder level and corresponding versions at the item level. Each product could have many versions a different point in time. These applications versions are physically deployed to support a business process and business capability. The following diagram depicts the relationship between application system and application version.
application 2

In the same way, you can capture technology and technology versions in Enterprise Evolver and also the dependency between application systems and technology.

app-tech map

You need a tool that provides you an environment for continuous architecture development and application portfolio analysis. Subscribe now !

Check out a brief video.