It is a question we get all of the time and its not so simple yet it can be crucial to you successful application portfolio practice and it could impact you enterprise architecture program since the application portfolio is a crucial tool in an EA practice.  In order to help you in identification of business applications, please see the attached document that @justincatchings has built for us.  

 

In ServiceNow’s Common Service Data Model (CSDM) Whitepaper, a Business Application is defined as
“A business application represents all software and infrastructure (For example catalog of titles) configured to provide business functionality. Business applications are the logical representation of all instances, used to increase productivity and to provide functionality to perform business functions accurately (For example payables, receivables, general ledger). Business applications are typically the software used by business users, but also may represent the “products” that the business uses for generating revenue or performing missions. They can span multiple environments and / or deployed per geography (For example dev, test, prod, or Americas, APJ, EMEA)”.

 

Let us take this definition further.   A Business Application is not Software but instead an abstract representation of all the Software, Hardware Technologies and Services that are working together to “perform” a business function.  It is important to remember that IT is business so this definition includes those foundation systems that are pillars of the enterprise such Identity and Access Control like Active Directory.   Another term for Business Applications might be Enterprise System or perhaps Digital System. 

 

In many cases, there may well be a single, key Software product that is indeed the “primary” software element of an overall deployment but it still requires at least some form of operation system and most like backend and middleware software plus virtual or actual hardware to run on. 

 

A Business Application record is the abstract, Design level,  parent of each and every deployment or instance of the application.  These deployments can vary widely in environment, locations, versions, constituent usage and so forth.   The common thread is they are all an “instance of” or a “deployment” and have a real physical presence.

 

What about Software as a Service (SaaS)? 

SaaS as well, the only difference with SaaS is how we treat the Application Service(s) as they will have no Infrastructure (Servers, Databases, middleware, etc.) associated because the actual running instances of software/hardware is hosted and managed by the vendor. 

 

Why is this software, “ABC Product” not a Business Application?

Why is something like Oracle Database not a Business Application?  Oracle DB is most certainly a very important part of many Business Applications but by itself, even deployed with its supporting software/hardware (servers, operating systems etc.) it does not do anything until such time as you configure an Application Schema, tables etc. and the other parts of the application, code, microservices, middleware connection and so forth push and pull data from it.