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Reclassify applications to IT components

  • July 31, 2025
  • 8 replies
  • 233 views
R

Hi everyone,

We’re currently undertaking an initiative to review and reclassify our LeanIX inventory. During this process, we’ve identified a number of fact sheets currently classified as Applications that may be more appropriately categorized as IT Components.

While we’ve reviewed the definitions provided in the LeanIX documentation, we’d really appreciate hearing from the community:

  • What criteria do you use to distinguish between an Application and an IT Component?
  • Are there any practical examples or decision frameworks you’ve found helpful?

Additionally, for those who have gone through a similar reclassification effort:

  • Did you manually create new IT Component fact sheets, or did you find the Export/Import method more efficient?
  • Any lessons learned or pitfalls to avoid?

Thanks in advance for your insights and experiences.

 

 

Best answer by Carsten

Hello ​@roben_n4 ,
this is a question with many possible answers. Due to the fact that there are meanwhile some enhancements lite subtype/category, it became more easier to  deal with that question. We are struggling with that, too. SharePoint or Office are some of these examples. Usually may people do not distinct beetween the software and application, eg. when they are talking about our intranet (big part based on sharepoint) they say look on our SharPoint instead using Intranet as the correct term. In the past I had SharePoint in the system, because of its generic AIP e.g. for reding lists. With the introduction of Microservices we were able to model it correctly.

A criteria for an App is that there has to be a concrete use-case for it. Another indicator is that there has usually to be an UI in place (there are exceptions). We do not model software with a (more or less) generic use case as an application, like zip programs, generic office applications, file managers, paint programs etc. But if we would have a use case for an Epense Excel-Sheet, e.g. T&L, I’d modify this T&L as application with the SW Component Excel linked to it. Btw: If anybody has a clear algorithm to decide when you classify as apllication or sw-component without exceptions that’d be great!

If you have to transform many applications to components, excel may become useful for the identical fields. If you are using LeanIX Sass/SAP discovery you will have to do it manually.
You should think of how to deal with existing interfaces(see my SharePoint example). We created Microservices in these cases.

Best regards,
Carsten
 

8 replies

Carsten
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  • Carsten
  • Everlasting Love
  • 135 replies
  • Answer
  • August 1, 2025

Hello ​@roben_n4 ,
this is a question with many possible answers. Due to the fact that there are meanwhile some enhancements lite subtype/category, it became more easier to  deal with that question. We are struggling with that, too. SharePoint or Office are some of these examples. Usually may people do not distinct beetween the software and application, eg. when they are talking about our intranet (big part based on sharepoint) they say look on our SharPoint instead using Intranet as the correct term. In the past I had SharePoint in the system, because of its generic AIP e.g. for reding lists. With the introduction of Microservices we were able to model it correctly.

A criteria for an App is that there has to be a concrete use-case for it. Another indicator is that there has usually to be an UI in place (there are exceptions). We do not model software with a (more or less) generic use case as an application, like zip programs, generic office applications, file managers, paint programs etc. But if we would have a use case for an Epense Excel-Sheet, e.g. T&L, I’d modify this T&L as application with the SW Component Excel linked to it. Btw: If anybody has a clear algorithm to decide when you classify as apllication or sw-component without exceptions that’d be great!

If you have to transform many applications to components, excel may become useful for the identical fields. If you are using LeanIX Sass/SAP discovery you will have to do it manually.
You should think of how to deal with existing interfaces(see my SharePoint example). We created Microservices in these cases.

Best regards,
Carsten
 

Carsten Schubert
GiannisAnt
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  • GiannisAnt
  • Veteran
  • 92 replies
  • August 4, 2025

In case you missed it see also:

 

 

R
  • roben_n4
  • Author
  • Rookie
  • 1 reply
  • August 5, 2025

Thank you ​@Carsten and ​@GiannisAnt for sharing your thoughts on reclassifying applications to IT component. Really appreciate it and it’s very helpful for anyone navigating those modeling decisions.

Didier.Nowak
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  • Didier.Nowak
  • Veteran
  • 50 replies
  • August 6, 2025

Hello ​@roben_n4 ,
I guess that everyone has gone through the question “application or IT Component”.
In our case, we consider an application being a solution that is consciously “consumed” (or used) by business end users. Usually , we can easily identify one or several business owners and we can link it to a business capability.
Ex: SAP S/4, Jira, Ariba, 

An IT component, to the opposite , would be mostly a software or service that “supports” one or several applications and that is not consciously “consumed” by end users:
Typical examples: DBMS (Oracle, SQL Server, ...), Middleware, Azure services, ….

Those definitions enabled us to easily classify 80-90% of our applications, but there are always special cases which are not really easy to sort out.

Like Carsten, we are not considering “utilities” or generic software, unless they incur significant cost to our organization.

carmen.guti
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  • carmen.guti
  • Royalty For Loyalty
  • 17 replies
  • August 28, 2025

Hopefully this decsion flow can help!

 

Carsten
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  • Carsten
  • Everlasting Love
  • 135 replies
  • August 28, 2025

Hi,
there are some additional constraints, e.g. is it interfaced, if yes, you have to create an application as interface endpoint. Examples my be Bi Server or EDI interfaces. So sometimes you need to have “artificial” applications. If you use Saas Discovery or SAP  discovery LeanIX sometimes create application even if you you do not need it, e.g. I do not need Azure Cosmos DB as in Application in my LeanIX repository.
Best regards,

Carsten

Carsten Schubert
Didier.Nowak
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  • Didier.Nowak
  • Veteran
  • 50 replies
  • August 29, 2025

Btw: If anybody has a clear algorithm to decide when you classify as apllication or sw-component without exceptions that’d be great!

+1 😁

 

more seriously , the way we approach it is that an application must be addressing a business purpose, so we should easily be able to define a business owner. And an application should be “consumed” consciously by end users.

with that rule, we can probably easlily classify 80/90% of our software… but , of course, there are still cases where it’s not so black and white.

on top of that, another challenge is to enforce the rule when you have multiple colleagues registering applications/IT Components in leanIX.

R
  • Roald Roos
  • Sophomore
  • 6 replies
  • September 5, 2025

We also moved a set of Applications to IT Components. Reason is the license issue with Applications. If you use Microsoft 365 you have a lot of Applications so your number of Apps will grow. 
Therefore we added Office 365 as an Application and connected it with the various IT Components (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, ToDo, List etc...).

Woud advice to create them new so you can use the reference catalogue of LeanIX. The provider (supplier) is than connected automatically. 


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