Business Capability Modeling: Concepts, Methods, and Benefits

Business capability modeling is a technique for creating a business anchor model that represents an organization’s distinct and differentiated capabilities, independent of its structure, systems, processes, people, or domain.

Organizations use business capability modeling to articulate and explore "what we do" so they can decide "how we do it". This should be done in close collaboration with business leaders, ideally driven by the business side rather than IT.

Below is an example of a business capability model for a consumer goods and services company.

Figure 1

Connecting Business Process Models to Business Capability Models

Business process owners and architects should link their high‑level process views to business capabilities to support impact analysis across inter‑dependencies. The most obvious method is to map top‑level process areas to at least one target business capability. Enterprise Architecture also links each capability to other views such as information, applications, and technology, which process architects can leverage.

Figure 2

Business Capability Modeling Methodology

1] Pitching the Concept of Business Capability Modeling to Management

First market for business capability modeling

Summarize the proposal by defining what the capability model will do and what business challenges it will address.

Explain how the technique works and give examples of the intended approach.

Describe the expected benefits of using this method.

Describe the business capability modeling approach

Provide a consistent model for knowledge sharing, collaboration, and decision‑making.

Identify inter‑dependencies and overlaps, breaking down silos of capabilities, processes, information, and technology.

Offer complete and coherent information for business/technology alignment and a common language for business‑IT communication.

Explain the following benefits

Offer a visionary direction for leaders and change management, helping implementers across multiple service lines follow a unified strategic plan.

Provide clear visibility from business to technology for enterprise technical planning.

Use a scalable, repeatable method to identify and leverage synergies across service lines.

2] Business Capability Model Development Process

First determine relevant details about service lines, including business strategy, principles, objectives, measures, benefits, capabilities, and key processes.

After understanding process‑level details, dive into people, information, applications, and systems involving service‑line leaders, EA resources, capability owners, and IT resources.

Create interview questions and templates.

Build the model.

3] Business and IT Adoption of the Capability Model

The business capability model can be used for various practical purposes:

Cross‑functional business planning

Resource planning (roles and responsibilities) and resource sharing

Facility design and department proximity planning

Identify relationships between critical business elements

Process design

Support project management

Communicate and plan business‑technology requirements

Develop a series of diagnostic deliverables from the capability modeling work so the IT organization can anticipate the shape of new business and better support transformation.

Source: http://jiagoushi.pro/business-capability-modeling

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