Tutorial: Map an Application to a Business Capability¶
This tutorial uses the Northstar Financial demo to show the most important OpenEA modeling pattern: connecting an application to the business capability it supports.
Goal¶
Create this architecture context:
Evaluation Customer App ── supports ──► Customer Management
Prerequisites¶
You need the Architect or Architecture Administrator role to create the Application. A Contributor can create relationships between existing objects but cannot create the new Application itself.
You can use the public demo at demo.openea.dev.
1. Review the target capability¶
Open Explore and search for:
Customer Management
Open the Business Capability record and review its existing relationships. In Northstar, Customer Management is a high-strategic-importance capability and already has application support.
2. Create the application¶
From Explore, select New → Application.
Use:
| Field | Suggested value |
|---|---|
| Name | Evaluation Customer App |
| Description | Tutorial application used to demonstrate business capability mapping. |
| Record Status | Active |
| Lifecycle | Active |
| Criticality | Medium |
| Business Fit | Good |
| Technical Fit | Good |
| Strategic Fit | Good |
| Source | Manual |
| Confidence | High |
Save the record.
3. Create the relationship¶
Open the new application's Relationships tab and add a relationship.
Choose:
Relationship: supports
Target type: Business Capability
Target: Customer Management
Save.
4. Verify both directions¶
From the Application, you should see:
Evaluation Customer App supports Customer Management
Now open Customer Management. From the capability side, OpenEA can display the governed inverse label:
Customer Management supported by Evaluation Customer App
Only one relationship is stored.
5. Observe downstream effects¶
This single relationship can affect:
- Capability supporting-application counts
- Capability Risk components
- Relationship coverage / repository health
- Capability-map overlays
- Impact Analysis paths
- Findings such as missing application support
This is why OpenEA treats relationships as first-class architecture data rather than as decorative lines on a diagram.
6. Clean up¶
If you are using the public demo, archive the tutorial Application when finished. Archiving the object preserves the historical record without leaving it active in the shared evaluation repository.