Written by
Chuen Seet
Is your organization talking about business capabilities? Are your business or enterprise architects struggling to demonstrate value to their stakeholders despite many efforts pushing business capability concepts?
At Jibility, we recognize business capability concepts are wide-ranging in their application and, therefore, in business value. Some business capability concepts require a high degree of business engagement, and these will typically deliver the highest business value due to the opportunity to build consensus and buy-in.
The below capability-based planning (capability modelling) adoption curve diagram shows that the highest business value will be delivered by shifting from basic business architecture application of business capability concepts (such as business capability definition and reference map) towards a capability-based planning engagement with business stakeholders to develop a strategic initiative roadmap.
The most common starting point is the definition of business capabilities, such as Human Resource Management, Financial Management or Operations Management, to gain an agreement on the meaning of these terms between the business and technology teams. This step helps establish a common language between all parties.
After defining a set of business capabilities, it is possible to lay out the business capabilities in a structured manner, which helps to contextualize and explain the business capabilities relative to each other. A business capability map shows all the mutually exclusive yet collectively exhaustive (MECE) business capabilities that help create a referenceable understanding of what the organization does.
Armed with a business capability map, an architect (in particular, one with a strong technology background) will often utilize the capability map to link each capability with technology solutions, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), or Order Handling systems. This helps identify potential technology or system impact due to changes to business capabilities or vice versa (system changes that may impact business capabilities).
With a business capability map and a holistic approach, a business architect can work closely with the stakeholders to identify business capability changes. More specifically, the business architect can define people, process and technology changes or actions required to improve an existing business capability or establish a new capability.
The formulation of initiatives is the grouping of actions into logical packages of work. The actions are derived from the business capability change assessment, so the initiatives are all substantiated, i.e,. there are no initiatives that cannot be traced back to a business capability change requirement. Additionally, the initiatives may be prioritized (such as value against delivery risk) to determine which initiatives must be implemented within time or budget constraints.
The final step to realizing the highest value from business capability concepts is to produce a prioritized and visual initiatives roadmap. The visualized initiative roadmap will simplify communications and agreement on the initiative scope of work and the delivery sequence to achieve the business goals.
To realize value from business capability concepts, business and enterprise architects must engage with the business to shift the emphasis from just talking about business capabilities to collaborating with the business stakeholders in capability-based planning.
Whether you're new to capability-based planning or a seasoned expert, Jibility makes it straight forward to build a visual capability map for your organization.
Jibility's capability mapping tool features in Step 3 of our unique Jibility Steps® method for building strategic roadmaps. The Capabilities Step comes with an in-built library of common capabilities, simple heatmapping, drag-and-drop prioritization labels, and the ability to easily draw links between capabilities and related strategic objectives.
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