Insightful Application Catalogues.

An Application Catalogue can be a fundamental element of your organization's reference architecture. Its importance can help in bridging gaps and shaping your target architecture.

In this article, we take a deep dive into what a simple application catalogue offers in terms of insights, usefulness and gap analysis. We also explore how linking it to other resources and artifacts can bring added value.

What is an Application Catalogue?

As the name suggests it is a list of your applications. But it can be much more than a simple inventory. An enriched catalogue might include attributes such as vendor, license type, application category, system architecture (On Premise, Cloud, etc), whether the application contains Personal Identifiable Information (PII), End of Life status, RPO, RTO, Authentication Type to name just a few key data points.

Without too much of a stretch on the grey matter, and by carefully defining these attributes, the catalogue can become a valuable tool for strategic planning and future decision making.

Application Feature Levels

Defining application levels enhances understanding and allows for better management of functionalities.

Consider a financial system as an example, this great financial wonder-system has many functions as it helps manage, Inventory, Assets, GL Ledger, Customer, Vendor, Sales and Purchase Order processing, etc. Each of these functional areas can be further divided into subcategories (levels). Take Assets for example; this could be Asset Appreciation, Asset Depreciation, Asset Management, Asset Reporting, etc.

Navigation

With a vast amount of information related to applications, good navigation can quickly become beneficial. A well-designed Application Catalogue should be, fully searchable and cross referenced with other systems.

Establishing relationships between applications and related artifacts improves usability and accessibility.

Dependency Management

Beyond a static list of applications with related attributes comes relationships to other well kept resource artifacts. Let me relate this to a recent article on Business Capability Model Benefit Realization.

By establishing relationships between applications and business capabilities, organizations can identify which applications support which capabilities, highlight gaps where no application fully supports a given capability.

Expanding the Application Catalogue

Steering away from Capability Mapping and back to the Application Catalogue, other aspects of an application can be catalogued in a similar way to capture additional insights, for example:

Capturing Database and Table Definitions provides a data dictionary related to our application and application levels.

Same can be said for reports, and to a certain extent integrations (but I’ll leave this one for another future article)

And many more.. You get the idea.

Another View

Enriching the model further you might consider introducing a rating system to evaluate how well applications fulfil business need.

By capturing revenue data through strategic pillars mapped to business capabilities, organizations can assess which application levels contribute positively, and which applications potentially require improvement or replacement.

Conclusion

Even in its simplest form, an Application Catalogue provides valuable insights into an organization's operational structure. Attributes such as platform type, license type, and end of life status offer crucial information. When linked to other foundational enterprise resources, the catalogue transforms into a powerful decision making tool, revealing gaps, dependencies, and strategic opportunities.