Unaccounted Costs

Ideally, the model in Txture should be complete, i.e. all assets and links should be present. If this is the case, Cost Propagation guarantees that:

• The sum of all grand total Application costs is equal to the sum of all grand total top-level Organizational Unit costs.
• The sum of all grand total Application costs is equal to the sum of all grand total top-level Business Capability costs.

This applies equally to Financial Costs, Carbon Emissions and Energy Consumption. However, if there are missing links or assets, these conditions cannot be met and there will be costs which are not accounted for in the Organizational Units or in the Business Capabilities.

In the example above, the costs of App 2 get evenly split between Business Process 1 and Organizational Unit 1 (see Financial Cost and Cost Splitting).

Let's compute the sums:

• Sum of all Applications = cost of App 1 + cost of App 2 = $ 200.0 + $ 300.0 = $ 500.0
• Sum of all Organizational Units = cost of Organizational Unit 1 = $ 150

Earlier we have established that the sum of all Application costs should be equal to the sum of all Organizational Unit costs. This is clearly not the case here, as we're missing $ 350 in the Organizational Unit cost sum.

The reason for this difference is that Business Process 1 does not belong to any Organizational Unit. It is a dead end in the Cost Propagation.

How to avoid Unaccounted Costs

• Ensure that there are no Cyclic Dependencies in your model.
• Ensure that there are no unconnected assets in your model which have direct costs.
• Ensure that every technical asset is connected (directly or indirectly) to at least one application
• Ensure that every application is connected (directly or indirectly) to at least one Organizational Unit
• Ensure that every application is connected (directly or indirectly) to at least one Business Capability
• Ensure that Organizational Units form a tree. Ideally, each Organizational Unit should belong to at most one parent Organizational Unit.
• Ensure that Business Capabilities form a tree. Ideally, each Business Capability should belong to at most one parent Business Capability.
• Ensure that your Asset Types are correctly tagged with the Semantic Asset Type Tags supported by Cost Propagation
• Ensure that your Link Types are correctly tagged with the Semantic Link Type Tags supported by Cost Propagation
• Be careful when assigning Distribution Weights of zero to links. There should always be at least one link to a parent with non-zero weight. If all links to parents have a Distribution Weight of zero, the asset becomes a dead end in cost propagation and its costs will be unaccounted for.