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Business Capability

A business capability describes a function, a capability or a skill set that an organization has - or needs. It answers the question what does this organization do? rather than how is it organized? or what technology does it run?

This distinction is what makes business capabilities useful. Organizational structures are re-drawn regularly and systems are replaced, but the capabilities an organization needs in order to operate change far more slowly. Describing the business in terms of its capabilities gives a stable frame that both the teams that provide them and the digital services that support them can be attached to.

Types of business capability

The businessCapabilityType property records the granularity of the capability:

  • Business domain - an overall area of activity in which the business operates. A single organization may run several, such as retail, distribution and banking.
  • Business area - a collection of related business services within a domain.
  • Business service - a single functional capability.

Business domains, areas and services are organized into a hierarchy using the BusinessCapabilityDependency relationship, which records the dependency between two business capabilities.

A business capability is a type of collection, and the team that owns it is linked to it using the CollectionMembership relationship.

Connecting the business to its digital estate

Business capabilities are the anchor point for the business context of technical metadata:

  • The DigitalSupport relationship records that a digital product or asset supports a particular business capability. This is what allows the question if this system fails, what part of the business stops? to be answered from the catalog.
  • The BusinessSignificance classification marks a metadata element as significant to a specific business capability.
  • The AccountingCodes classification attaches the accounting codes used to track the financial aspects of an element - a single accountingCode, an accountingCodeList, or an accountingCodeMap of name-to-code mappings for organizations with complex accounting structures.
  • An information supply chain can name the business capability that initiates or consumes each flow of data.
  • The DataScope classification on a data store is often matched to a data lens defining the scope of data for a business capability.
Additional information
  • The BusinessCapability type, the BusinessCapabilityType enumeration and the related relationships and classifications are described in Model 0715 Digital Business.
  • The Digital Business API provides the operations for defining business capabilities, linking them to the digital services that support them, and classifying elements with their business significance.

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