Capability Modeling Crash Course — Part 1
In recent years, the idea of business capability modeling has emerged in the Business & Enterprise Architecture community. Much has been written about the idea of capability-based planning, yet only a few business executives use the concept in practice. If you browse the internet, it’s very hard to find good examples. Capabilities, an enormously powerful tool when accepted by the business, are still kept as a hidden treasure in the ivory tower of architects. To change that, the Architectural Thinking Framework includes a draft of detailed guidelines that show you, step-by-step, how to model capabilities.
Today we start a series of three blog posts that provide a crash course in capability modeling. It includes the experience of ten years of trial and error in several companies and has been reviewed by many practitioners.
The Architectural Thinking Framework defines the concept of capabilities as follows:
Definition: Capability
A business capability is a core of ‘what’ a business does.
When correctly defined, capabilities form its robust centre-piece [BIZBOK].
The BIZBOK® Guide defines a number of principles for capabilities. These principles and guidelines can be summarised in a few simple points, including the following:
- Capabilities define what, not how, a business does something, meaning that capabilities provide a robust, long-standing business perspective;
- Capabilities represent unique, non-redundant views of the business that are defined once for the business;
- Capabilities are not defined haphazardly or on demand by a given program or business unit, but they do represent a foundational, ubiquitous business perspective across programs and business units.
Why Capability Modeling is mandatory for your Digital Transformation
- Capabilities clarify terms and concepts across organizational borders. Capabilities provide a robust skeleton, a framework for assigning all the other elements of enterprise architecture. A capability is ‘elegant in its simplicity yet powerful in its ability to serve as a focal point for transformations — large and small’ [BIZBOK].
- Capabilities help to make the business strategy executable. They align technology with the business by providing structure for all assets created, from business strategy to IT implementation.
- Capabilities can be used as the central structure for heat mapping to answer questions such as: ‘Which strategic fields of actions do we see in which capability?’; ‘In which capabilities are we planning to invest how much?‘; ‘Which capabilities are supported too little by IT?’
- EAs apply business capability modeling to better plan IT solutions that meet the needs of their business customers.
- Cross mapping capabilities with value streams help a business to envision which capabilities are required to enable customer value across a variety of scenarios. Value streams are cross mapped to capabilities, to show how a company orchestrates capabilities in order to create customer value.
- Strategic Fields of Action used in strategic planning can be assigned to business capabilities. Thus, capabilities are valuable in order to align projects with the vision/strategy of the company
To be continued…
Next week, we will learn how to use industry-specific capability reference models, and how to derive capabilities from your existing process models.
References
- Business Architecture Body of Knowledge (BIZBOK) Guide — https://www.businessarchitectureguild.org/page/about
- Architectural thinking framework — https://architectural-thinking.com/architectural-thinking-overview/
