A business capability model or business capability map (BCM) provides structured graphical representations of all organizational business capabilities, their relationship and hierarchy.
Overview
Business capability models represent high-level views of an organization from the perspective of its business capabilities. Essentially, they briefly describe everything that an organization can do. Business capability models are very stable and organizationally neutral in nature. They are largely independent of specific organizational structures, reporting relationships, political agendas and cultural aspects of individual business leaders, current initiatives and projects. Furthermore, most changes happening in organizations do not affect the fundamental structure of their business capability models.
Contents
Business capability models are structured in a hierarchical manner, i.e. each higher-level business capability includes multiple constituting lower-level capabilities. They can have several nested levels of depth and granularity, typically from two to four distinct abstraction levels depending on the size, complexity and experience of an organization. At the highest level, often considered as level zero, all business capabilities can be separated into customer-facing (front office) capabilities and operational (back office) capabilities. Top-level business capabilities can be also organized according to main organizational functions, e.g. enable, manage and run, or aligned to core activities of the value chain, e.g. logistics, operations, sales and service. Underlying lower-level business capabilities are naturally more numerous and fine-grained. Specific business capabilities in business capability models can be titled using either a noun-verb style or a verb-noun style, e.g. "product development" or "develop products".
In their simplest form business capability models can show only structured sets of nested business capabilities and sub-capabilities. However, more sophisticated versions of these EA artifacts can also provide additional information regarding an organization and its environment relevant for strategic decision-making. Complex business capability models often include an organizational mission, strategy and vision, document its long-term goals, objectives and constraints and even show the most important elements of its external business environment that should be taken into account during strategic planning, e.g. key competitors, strategic partners, major suppliers, target markets, core customer groups, industry regulators or some other critical elements of the organizational context.
Development
Since business capability models offer only a very high-level view of an organization, usually they can be created rather quickly. Perfect accurateness and correctness are not among their most important or critical qualities. Moreover, more intuitive and simple business capability models are more likely to resonate with the thought processes of business executives. In many industries the development of business capability models can be accelerated via taking openly available industry-standard reference models or even proprietary generic reference models provided by commercial vendors as the basis for producing customized, organization-specific capability models. In some cases, separate parts of business capability models representing common groups of the most typical capabilities, e.g. customer management or product management, can be borrowed from other industries and adapted to the organizational needs.