Post # 3
We have seen how our discussions of business architecture highlight the primary task of "architecting the business" via a transformational road map, which essentially keeps the business strategies formulated at the highest executive levels closely in mind, as EA clarifies the IT solutions which help develop the business capabilities of the organization, in order to bring value to its customers and enable competitive advantage.
A business capability is what an organization needs to be able to execute its business strategy. And as such, the organization may identify the need for a number of capabilities as part of its strategies. To do so, a capability must thus be a collection of people, process, and technology -- all of which are needed to address a specific purpose or goal. To manage and prioritize capability identification and development, the organization will need to review its customer value proposition in order to establish performance goals for capabilities. Ultimately, the organization should focus on those key capabilities that bring efficiencies in costs and operations, innovation and growth.
An organizational capability will need to refer to the way its people and systems work together. Organizations are said to have capabilities, while its individual members are said to have the competencies. Combining all of these together, it is said that the resulting company's culture is defined by how management fosters talent, mindsets, and collaboration as it strengthens competencies. Moreover, social and technical competencies on one side, and organizational capabilities on the other, will work together and can intersect in different ways. As business architecture provides key inputs towards the tranformational EA road map, effective change management will make sure to consider culture and competencies with capability development.
Alongside business capability, what we study and call "process" is that which describes how the capability is executed. There is thus a basic difference between business capabilities and business processes. Business capability is “what” the business can do in order to reach its goals and objectives, while the business process is “how” the business is making use of its competencies to do things, or what actions are taking place in order to promote and execute those capabilities. Much of the business reengineering hype of the previous decades, or the so-called business process reengineering activities, focused on how to redesign business processes to achieve higher efficiencies and operational effectiveness.
There is no doubt that the architecture community is familiar with using different notations for describing business processes -- e.g. known standards such as BPMN and its versions, as well as the BPEL, UML, IDEF models. On the other hand, capability modeling is a less familiar activity. Not surprisingly, capability modeling is more difficult to deal with, because capabilities are more abstract notions, and grasping such takes more time and effort. However, understanding capabilities is a critical success factor for the organization, as it brings an important advantage, since the "what is needed" or capability of the business is part of the strategy. Lastly, it is useful to note that a capability is logically a more permanent fixture and theme in the organization's guiding horizon, and is seldom changed, characterized as long-term. In contrast, the "how" of a business process can be quite dynamic, and adaptive to the emerging tools -- and therefore has the tendency to change, and can be changed a lot.
Finally, what we call the "solution architecture" is the framework with which EA delivers a needed capability to the business, where the delivered capability consists of process, information and technology components. Solutions maintain their integrity and coherence within the framework by adhering to the principles, standards and guidelines captured in the Enterprise Architecture, perhaps with ESA-level guidance such as solution patterns, to ensure that individual solution architectures remain consistent to the EA at large.
Conclusion:
The way an organization's people and systems work together, combining to form the organization's culture, defines how management fosters talent, mindsets, and collaboration. Together, these factors enable the organization to develop capabilities which are essential to the organization, as well as those which address specific business necessities, strategic support, and key differentiators in its customer value proposition which create advantage.
As we continue to find ways of showing value for business architecture -- perhaps with better definitions for its methodological framework, we need to learn mastery of mapping out capability development, to enable and promote the organization's pursuit of the so-called "digital business". By doing so, business architects can help the organization better understand the impact of technology on business value, and help the IT organization better understand how to develop tools and frameworks that business can use to unleash competitive advantage for the organization.
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