Vanguard EA

Guiding Enterprise Change

Capability Mapping and Alignment

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Capability Mapping and Alignment

There is a great deal of passion in the business and enterprise architecture communities around the concept of business capabilities.  Some will say that business capabilities are critical to quality and that an approach that doesn’t include a capability model is simply “not architecture.”  Others challenge the use of capabilities at all, declaring there to be no difference between a capability and a function.

The attitude of Vanguard EA is that the decision to use the concept of business capabilities is a case-by-case decision dependent on the enterprise in question.  Business capabilities are a useful tool, and we have found them to be very helpful in many situations.  For example:

  • When drawing attention to areas of the business that have often been ignored for investment but are necessary for the strength, stability, and agility of the enterprise.
  • When building a balanced scorecard for business strategy that reflects the needs of the customers and the employees, not just the investors,
  • When ferreting out the underlying weaknesses in an organization’s processes that prevents strategic projects from delivering needed results.

Business capabilities are a very useful tool because they are not business functions, nor are they business processes.  A business capability is something that the business can do, but may not be doing, or may be doing poorly.  A business capability may be architecturally coherent yet implemented in a manner that loses that coherence by spreading it across multiple functions with disjointed processes.  As a result, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of a business capability, an organization can find and fix key problems.

Vanguard EA can help you to build your capability map, find the “hot” capabilities that need to be addressed, and focus investment upon them.

If you’d like to know more about this service, please fill out our online contact form and we will respond to you within one business day.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]