Glossary

Business capability

Also called: capability · capability map · business capabilities

What an organization must know how to do, expressed independently of who does it or which system supports it.

A business capability answers what the organization must be able to do — settle a claim, onboard a supplier, audit a taxpayer — without saying who does it, in which department, or with which software. That independence is the point: reorganizations and system replacements change constantly, while capabilities are stable for years.

Capabilities are what keeps a process catalogue from becoming a list. Asking which capability a process answers to is the question that reveals processes nobody can justify, and capabilities the organization claims but cannot actually perform.

On this site: Executable Architecture →

Related terms

Business architecture

A structured, coherent representation of how an organization creates, delivers and captures value.

Business structure

The component of the business model describing how the enterprise organizes itself to produce the value it offers: units, roles and accountabilities.

Capability map

A hierarchical model of an organization's capabilities, classified by type (core, strategic, enabling) and criticality.

Dynamic capabilities

An organization's ability to sense opportunities and threats, seize them, and reconfigure its resource base in changing environments.

Executable Business Architecture

Business architecture whose artefacts are the objects a platform actually runs, rather than diagrams describing it from outside.

Process enablers and enterprise capabilities

The distinction between what makes a process mature (design, performers, owner, infrastructure and metrics) and what makes an enterprise mature (leadership, culture, expertise and governance).

Resource-based view

The theory that sustainable competitive advantage stems from resources and capabilities that are valuable, rare, hard to imitate and well exploited by the organization.

Service

A unit of value the organization offers to an internal or external stakeholder, underpinned by capabilities and resources.

Service portfolio

The set of services an organization offers, understood as the operational expression of its value proposition rather than an administrative list of request types.

Traceability chain

The ordered relationship from strategy through capabilities, services, offerings, processes and data to the indicators that verify results.

Value stream

The end-to-end sequence of value-adding stages that produces an outcome for a stakeholder.