Logical Inventory- EA repository

We capture comprehensive information about the architecture components (building blocks) and their relationships inside a repository (logical inventory). This logical inventory could be used by IT planner to support any IT projects. Some of the information, that are captured in the logical inventory, are as follows:

• Organization hierarchies, roles and responsibilities
• Business goals, problems, capabilities, objectives and strategies
• Business Functions hierarchies and business process hierarchies
• Hierarchies of business services and functional activities
• Information and data exchange between activities, business units and external business partners
• Business events and business cycles
• Business rules, policies, regulatory information, and risk
• Relevant business requirements and project proposals
• Applications and its version, application environment and application internal architecture
• Business data with sufficient meta data information
• Technology standards, product and compliance information
• Business locations, logistics and devices and their connection
• Deployed components on a physical server
• Financial in terms of hardware and software maintenance cost, license and human resource cost and so on so

This logical inventory maintain relationship between any architecture component and provides an end to end view of the as-is environment. Following analysis could easily be performed from the logical inventory:

• Which business unit/organization uses which application for which service?
• Who are the stakeholders and what are their demands and what business processes support those demand?
• What are the master data, extended data, and meta data and what data are shared among business units/business partners and agencies?
• Where application's re-usable components are deployed and why?
• How demands are related with the budget? and
• Where are all servers located and what critical applications are being supported on those servers?

Once an as-is state of an enterprise has been created in the logical inventory, the next step is to anlyze, control and align IT projects with the Business.