Business Capabilities

Business Capability is a concept from TOGAF, where it is defined as a particular ability or capacity that a business may possess or exchange to achieve a specific purpose or outcome.

Business Capabilities are usually described in levels, where level 0 describes very broad capabilities like Sales & Marketing, and the as the level increases, the capability becomes more specific, such as Customer Success Management (level 1) and Customer Onboarding (level 2).

val offeringSuperheroServices: BusinessCapability =
    ea describes BusinessCapability(title = "Offering Superhero Services") as {
      it =>
        it serves enterprises.wayneCorp
    }

val managingSecretLairs: BusinessCapability =
    ea describes BusinessCapability(title = "Managing Secret Lairs") as { it =>
      it serves offeringSuperheroServices
      it has Description(
        "Every enterprise that serves as the cover for a superhero needs secret lairs. And when you have secret lairs, you need to manage them."
      )
    }

Properties

Description

A Business Capability can have 0 or more descriptions.

val managingSecretLairs: BusinessCapability =
    ea describes BusinessCapability(title = "Managing Secret Lairs") as { it =>
        it has Description(
          "Every enterprise that serves as the cover for a superhero needs secret lairs. And when you have secret lairs, you need to manage them."
        )
    }

Links

val managingSecretLairs: BusinessCapability =
  ea describes BusinessCapability(title = "Managing Secret Lairs") as { it =>
      ...
      it has Wiki("https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/BCMS")
      ...
}

External ID

An external ID is a reference to the description, documentation, implementation or anything else in some external system, for example in another EA tool, or in a cloud platform.

val managingSecretLairs: BusinessCapability =
  ea describes BusinessCapability(title = "Managing Secret Lairs") as { it =>
      ...
      it isIdentifiedAs "{42a5e9d4-188d-4509-8145-eaac65ab86b8}" on "Sparx EA"
      ...
}

Tags

Business capabilities can be tagged, see the page on Tags for more information.

Relationships

Serving

A business capability can serve an enterprise, or another business capability. This is how the hierarchy of business capabilities is created.

val offeringSuperheroServices: BusinessCapability =
    ea describes BusinessCapability(title = "Offering Superhero Services") as {
      it =>
        it serves enterprises.wayneCorp
    }
val managingSecretLairs: BusinessCapability =
    ea describes BusinessCapability(title = "Managing Secret Lairs") as { it =>
      it serves offeringSuperheroServices
      it has Description(
        "Every enterprise that serves as the cover for a superhero needs secret lairs. And when you have secret lairs, you need to manage them."
      )
    }

Realization

A business capability can be realized by an architecture building block.

  val managingSecretLairs: BusinessCapability =
    ea describes BusinessCapability(title = "Managing Secret Lairs") as { it =>
      it isRealizedBy buildingBlocks.lairManagement
    }

Impact

A business capability can be impacted by a decision or a project or project milestone. This relationship however is added on the side of the decision, project or milestone.