Classifying applications into groups and categories helps your organization track and compare the applications. You can identify relationships and redundancies between the applications more easily. You can also build a complete applications inventory and map the applications to the business functions.

Set up these attributes for classifying and grouping applications:

Application category
This attribute is mandatory. It is a grouping attribute which you can use to make application rationalization decisions. Typically you can use this attribute to group applications used in a business process or department. The applications can have overlapping or complementary capabilities, but they are a part of the same business function and must be reviewed together during an application rationalization exercise. The summarized information at the application category level enables you to compare applications within a category using various metrics.
Category group
This attribute is optional. It is a grouping attribute for filtering and reporting of application categories.
Application family
You can use this optional attribute to group the applications by the manufacturers classification of their products into various product suites.
Business Process
This attribute is an optional attribute that is primarily used for filtering and reporting. Level one (L1) of a business process is a high-level representation that outlines the business operations of an organization. Ideally L1 business process can be tagged. For example, Oracle Order Management can be tagged to the business process ‘Quote to Cash’. The detailed mapping between the application and the business processes can be created using the CI relationship.
Software Model
This attribute is available with the base instance and contains the specifications of the software such as the manufacturer, version, release date, and end of life date. Business application references the corresponding software model record to automatically pull in the software specifications.

To check out an application classification example, see Application Classification Example.