Capability-Based Development
Capability-Based Development
Handbook
Document information
Version 1.0
Status First version
Created 2022-12-30
Modified 2023-03-24
Author Eero Hosiaisluoma
Capability-Based Development
Handbook
Table Of Contents
1. Introduction 3
1.1 Purpose And Scope 3
1. Business Capabilities - the DNA of an organization 3
1.2 "Stable from the outside, versatile from the inside" 4
1.3 Anatomy of a Business Capability 4
1.4 Business Capabilities - Key Components of the business 5
2. Business Capability Map 7
2.1 Capability Map Levels 1-n 8
2.2 Value Streams and Business Capabilities 10
2.3 Value Stream-based Capability Map 10
3. Capability-Based Development 12
3.1 Capability-Based Functional Decomposition 12
3.2 Starting the Capability-Based Development 13
3.3 Executing the Capability-Based Development Approach 14
3.4 Development vs. Planning 15
3.5 Business Capability Characteristics - how to identify business capabilities? 16
3.6 Business Capability Definitions 17
3.7 Business Capability - Business and IT together, and more... 18
3.8 Changes in the Organization are changes to its Business Capabilities 19
3.9 Business Capability misconceptions 20
4. Business Capability Views 21
4.1 Business Capability Canvas 22
4.2 Behavior and structure 24
4.3 Business Capability and Resources 25
4.4 Business Capability Modelling 26
4.4.1 Business Capability Canvas Example 27
4.4.2 Additional diagrams 28
4.5 Business Transformation Roadmap 30
4.6 Capability Transformation Roadmap 31
5. Business Capability-Based practical approach 33
5.1.1 Goal Analysis View Method 34
5.2 Goal Analysis View Method - an extended version 34
5.3 Paradigm shift to Value Stream- and Capability-Based approach 35
5.3.1 Considerations 35
5.3.2 Value Stream and Capability-Based approach 36
5.3.2.1 Development perspective 37
5.3.2.2 Operational perspective 38
5.3.2.3 Management perspective 39
5.3.2.4 Organization structure perspective 39
5.4 Value Demand, Value Stream & Business Capabilities 39
6. Summary 42
7. Reference material 44
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1. Introduction
1.1 Purpose And Scope
This document introduces the Capability-Based Development approach for developing an organization.
This document is a living document, it is continuously updated. The latest version can be found from the blog site:
https://www.hosiaisluoma.fi/blog/capability-based-development/
● The mission refers to the existential fundamentals of an organization, to motivate its purpose: why the
organization exists, what are the reasons for being, and what are the strategic goals.
● The business refers to the operations by which the organization performs its business model.
● A business capability describes what the business does and should not be confused with just the skills or
competencies of the people [Chuen Seet].
Figure 2: Business Capabilities are the basic building blocks of the organization.
Note! Business capabilities are nothing new or something extra. Business capabilities already exist in the
organization, even though we don't talk about biz capabilities or we haven't visualized them. Business capabilities
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are behavioral things we already have in place in the organization, anyway. It is just that business capabilities can
be identified and their content can be harvested and made visible. Then they can be used as basic building blocks
of business operations, business development and business management.
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Based on the behavioral nature, the very core of a business capability can be characterized by the business
processes and/or -functions. Consequently, a business capability is typically built up around a process, a
performance, a capacity of doing something and producing desired outcomes. By default, this behavior is
something that needs to be done - according to the strategy and business model of the organization. Commonly
this behavior is directed to information of some kind. So, a business capability is a coherent business component,
that is a composition of elements belonging together, based on certain cohesion criteria.
A business capability is a behavioral, coherent business component,
that is a composition of elements belonging together, based on certain cohesion criteria.
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● Business Operations, this contains the core operational (operating) business capabilities (incl. customer-
facing capabilities, used by customers)
● Business Support, this contains the capabilities that enable the core business
● Business Management & -Development, contains the capabilities that direct the change of the business
(incl. planning-, transforming- and dynamic capabilities)
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Table A: A table structure for harvesting and classifying business capabilities for visualizing them in a business
capability map.
This above-mentioned structure of the business capability map is aligned with the actual business as shown in the
figure below. All the business capabilities can be placed into certain dimensions of the overall business. Core
capabilities are necessary for business operations, some capabilities support the core business, and some
capabilities are needed to direct and change the overall business landscape. The latter category of business
capabilities is a kind of dynamic capabilities, as they are necessary for the dynamics: for managing the change
activities with which the organization performs, ensuring and controlling the changes that are needed for managing
the continuous change. These dimensions of business are illustrated in the figure below.
Figure 8: Business development dimensions, that are analogous to the categories of the business
capability map.
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Figure 11: Value Stream, Value Stages and related Business Capabilities - an overview of the organization.
A value stream enables and encourages flexible organizational structure and prevents silos.
A value stream explains why business capabilities exist in the organization.
A value stream defines how an organization responds to the value demand of customers.
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Value Stream and business capabilities represent the actual business. They are the business.
3. Capability-Based Development
3.1 Capability-Based Functional Decomposition
The Capability-Based Development approach is a view of the organization. It focuses on business behavior. The
whole business is divided into logically coherent behavioral parts, into business capabilities as shown in the figure
below. This is so-called functional decomposition of the whole organization.
A business capability is the most comprehensive concept to define those "behavioral business things", that have to
be in place so that the organization can run its business and produce wanted outcomes. By splitting the business
into business capabilities, it is practical a) to operate the business, b) develop the business and c) manage the
business.
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The capability-based development approach is a journey. It requires certain steps to be taken for achieving higher
maturity and getting the most applicable benefits out of business capabilities: e.g. better insight into the business
and fact-based knowledge of the operational level elements for the overall development. This organization-level
collaborative learning path is an advantageous and rewarding joint effort. See the applied maturity levels in the
figure below.
Start the capability-based journey by identifying the business capabilities and documenting their content.
Figure 17: The role of a business capability in Capability-Based Development - the continuous flow of
tuning the business.
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In this overall development, the business capabilities are crucial, fundamental concepts, as all (!) the demands can
be pointed to specific business capabilities. Why? How? Because business capabilities represent the whole
business, and all the operational elements are included in those business capabilities.
Figure 18: Business Capabilities - the crucial concepts in the overall development of an organization.
The business operations, the operational business is the beef. The simplified picture of the operational business is
shown below. The basic elements of all the organizations are as follows: the actual behavior is represented by the
processes, in which the personnel/employees work and handles information (data) with the applications -all this is
provided as business services to the customers.
Figure 19: Business Capabilities compose all the relevant elements of daily business operations.
Business development can be organized around the development value stream, "idea to production" (according to
Lean EA).
Business operations are the most important.
They can be managed and developed by Business Capabilities.
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not only in case of planning the changes, but also in executing the business operations and managing the whole
business.
The overall development of an organization covers, when thinking broadly, the whole development value stream
from demand management to business operations (from "idea to production", see Lean EA and LEAF and LEAD).
The overall development looks like a waterfall, but it has a built-in feedback loop as illustrated in the figure below.
This is a high-level abstraction of the overall development, that can be further defined in a detailed development
process.
Capability-Based Development is an overall, holistic approach - not just planning - but managing,
developing and operating the business!
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o All the behavior in the organization is not necessarily needed to be expressed as capabilities, but
perhaps processes that enable the capability
● Business capabilities are the most comprehensive concepts, as they consist of all the other concepts!
● Business capabilities are the highest level of business abstraction - "when we are already at the North
pole, we can't go north anymore"
● Business capabilities are to be agreed & committed with the management (C-level), as business
capabilities are their tools in the first place.
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Figure 26: Business Capability viewpoints: a) the business perspective and b) the resource-based view.
A quite common misconception is to associate capabilities with the skills or competencies of the people. Those are
not capabilities, but they belong to capabilities, they are parts of capabilities, as they are related to actors (of
capabilities).
Business Capability represents behavior that the organization can perform. Behavior can be defined as
business processes and/or business functions. They represent what is the action that is performed by
the business capability. The behavior requires an actor, the "doer". The actor uses applications for
handling data. The actor has some skills and competencies, these can be defined with business roles.
All these elements compose a business capability.
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Customer View. All the business-relevant elements can be introduced in the business capability canvas, which is
a simplified representation of a business capability. In addition to the intra-organizational elements, it is also
possible to identify the customers and/or customer roles in the content area named "Business Actors & -Roles".
This extends the usage of the business capability canvas also from the inside-out aspect to the outside-in aspect:
to the customer view by showing which customer groups have some touch points with the business capability in
question.
Where a business capability map is a map of organizational elements,
a business capability canvas is a map of business capability elements.
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Capability analyses start by identifying the value stream (or value stream stage) into which the capability can be
connected. The value stream is the reason for being of the capability.
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Figure 35: Business Capability Canvas ArchiMate version - the business capability content diagram.
Modelling a business capability with this business capability canvas is an easy task to do within an appropriate
enterprise architecture modelling tool. From the business capability map, it is possible to drill down into a specific
business capability content diagram. From a diagram to a sub-diagram, from a map to an element.
Resources. When planning and developing business capabilities, for the sake of simplicity, it is practical to include
resources in the business capability (and not having resource -elements in the repository of the enterprise
architecture modelling tool). In this way it is easy to analyze and communicate what is the meaning of a business
capability, and how it is implemented. It is practical to visualize all the relevant elements together as a whole.
However, we might have good reasons to model certain things with the resource -element. For example, when we
are planning a new business capability, or we don't yet know or we don't want to go into details, then it is possible
to add the resource elements into the business model canvas content areas (though not suggested according to
ArchiMate standard). In such cases, we can add named resource elements such as "Customer-facing
Application(s)" or "Customer Support" without specifying what they actually are, or how they are to be
implemented.
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Figure 36: Claims Management Business Capability visualized within the Business Capability Canvas.
It is valuable to make all the elements of a business capability visible so that it is possible to analyze what is
needed for such behavior in the organization. In this example above, even the technologies are shown, as they are
known (see the Layered View below). However, specifying technologies is not at the core of a business capability,
as underlying technologies can be changed without touching the other elements of the business capability (such as
processes or applications).
Note! When modelling a business capability canvas with an appropriate EA-tool, be aware that the realization
relations between the capability and the included (nested) elements have to be created manually, if the tool does
not create those connections automatically (like the Archi -tool does). Creating realization relations explicitly
between the elements is not a necessity, but it is important to enabling further analysis, and getting relations
automatically from the repository when creating new diagrams. In addition to the realization relation types, other
relation types, such as serving or flow, are to be created in other diagrams (such as Layered Views and/or
Cooperation Views).
A business capability canvas defines the content of a business capability.
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A transformation roadmap with transitions defines which capabilities are changed in which phases.
A transformation roadmap can be linked with strategic goals, outcomes and requirements as shown in the figure
below. This view illustrates with which capabilities the goals are realized.
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Each capability increment contains certain elements of the capability that are to be modified within the transition
phase. Those elements can be a) existing elements (such as processes or interfaces), or they can be b) completely
new elements or features (such as new functions, applications or sub-systems etc.).
High-level Capability Transformation Roadmap. This high-level capability transformation roadmap introduces
which changes are to be made at the enterprise architecture (EA) level. Elements are EA elements, that are
maintained in the EA tool of the organization.
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After business capabilities are documented, they provide a foundation for change demand management in the
organization. Whenever new change requests, ideas and demands occur, a practical Goal Analysis Method can be
used for analyzing the change effects on the organization.
Table C: Goal analysis view expressed in the table format. This can be easily implemented e.g. in plain old Excel
or Confluence, by adding new rows for each goal.
The basic facts of any development case, of any change demand, can be first discussed and listed in this simple
table format. First, the drivers are discussed: why we need something to be changed. Before doing anything, we
should understand and agree on what are the problems now. Then we can set the goals and finally identify the
concrete outcomes. This simple method is analytical and pragmatic. Its remarkable advantage is based on the
order of the questions: it forces us first to analyze problems in the current situation, and rationalize the reasons why
something needs to be changed. Then, only after the drivers are listed, it is beneficial to continue goal setting, and
defining the outcomes. Making all these aspects visible is important for motivation purposes: people like to see the
reasons so that they can orientate and commit. So let's start with why (as Simon Sinek has pointed out in his
famous TED speech, link).
This three-phased Goal analysis approach differs e.g. from the way how the OKR (Objectives and Key Results)
method, which two-phased approach, concentrates on objectives and results only. The main difference is
concerning the drivers of why certain goals & outcomes are needed.
The Goal Analysis Method is a simple approach to evaluate the basics of a business demand:
WHY, WHAT and HOW.
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Figure 45: Centralized and de-centralized hybrid approach. Focus on business unit content, from which the
EA content is aggregated gradually.
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Figure 47: Value Stream and capability-based development approach. Each capability consists of a specific
set of BDAT elements.
Business capabilities altogether represent the most valuable approach to analyzing the whole organization and its
business. When the organization's operational value stream(s) are described, and concerned business capabilities
are identified and defined (within the business capability maps), and the content of business capabilities are
modelled, then we have a business capability model - the capability architecture in place. That can help the
organization speed up the development, and ease the management, as the operational business is known well
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enough. Then we might tune the organization's development value stream (e.g. according to Lean EA), and utilize
the capability architecture in all the development cases (ideas, demands, strategic requirements etc.).
The capability-based approach can be defined also within an applied Milky Way Map, which visualizes the
operational value stream, business capabilities and the customer journey in one overall view. The value stream
with value stages is visualized in the inner circle (yellow), and the business capabilities are shown as sectors
(blue). Customer journey on the outer circle on top of the picture.
Figure 48: Operational Value Stream, Business Capabilities and Customer Journey overview (applied from
the Milky Way Map).
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they are added to the development portfolio. Then the changes are implemented and deployed to the operational
business.
Concept Design is a co-working phase, in which different roles (such as service designers and business architects)
together analyze the value demand of the customer. In this phase, customer insight is one of the most important
aspects. It is crucial to get an understanding, of what is the actual need (behind desires). This customer need is
defined in the concept, which contains all the relevant information. The concept document can be created based on
a common template, that consists e.g. of the following information: drivers, goals & outcomes, a business model
canvas (BMC), an information flow diagram, alternative options, and the suggested solution.
Figure 51: Capability Architecture - the runway to the business-driven architecture and viable enterprise
architecture.
Note! "Capability Architecture" is not just an architectural view, it is the view of the organization and its business.
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Figure 52: Holacracy vs. Hierarchy. (See link for more information.)
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Figure 54: Operational value stream illustrates how the organization responds to the value demand - how
the organization creates value.
It is beneficial and practical to define the operational value stream, and connect it with the business capabilities.
The operational value stream with business capabilities makes it visible how the organization responds to the value
demand initiated by customers. And, with business capabilities, it is also possible to tackle the failure demand,
which is a consequence of failures and bad quality in services.
It is widely known that failure demand generates a lot of extra work, which - in turn - creates extra costs as it intensively uses
the organization's resources. And what is extremely harmful, failure demand causes decreased customer experience (CX),
which affects to organization's (and brand) image etc. It also affects negatively to the employee experience. As we know,
“Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.”
[Richard Branson].
Business capabilities have an impact on value creation, customer value and business value, and also on intra-
organizational efficiency. This is obvious, as business capabilities contain all the operational elements from which
the business is made of. Therefore, both customer value and business value creation can be affected by
(fine)tuning and trimming the business capabilities to be as efficient as possible.
Service Design + Business-Driven Architecture = Customer Value + Business Value (market value)
Together with service design and business-driven architecture, it is possible to get the best available customer
insight and business insight, both of which are necessary to get the overall understanding of how the customer's
value demands can be fulfilled in daily business operations. And when developing the business, during the concept
design phase, service design and business-driven architecture methods and tools together enable the most
comprehensive and practical approach to analyze, design, and make the changes to the organization as follows:
● With service design methods and tools, it is possible to get the best overview of customer insight,
supported by data analytics (DA).
● With business capabilities, which are the core of the business-driven architecture, it is possible to get the
best understanding of business insight (business services, -processes, -functions, -actors, data,
applications, technologies etc.).
Customer insight and business insight provide the most valuable information for overall business development, and
also for knowledge-based business management.
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Figure 55: Service Design and Business-Driven Architecture are complementary methods.
By considering the organization from the customer's point of view and the organization's view together, it is
possible to achieve the most comprehensive overview. This can be illustrated with the iceberg analogy, in which
the customer view is all that customers see, and the organization view is below the waterline. The organization
view covers all the intra-organizational elements, that are not visible to customers, but those are the elements with
which the organization produces the services and/or products for customers. These views are interconnected and
inseparable. That's why it is reasonable to consider them together. Holistically. Business capabilities help with this
as they combine all these elements to be considered, analyzed, developed and operated together as clearly
defined building blocks of business (as business components).
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6. Summary
Business Capability-based development is an approach, that serves all the levels of an organization: from the
strategic level to the operational level. Business capabilities are central concepts and components of an
organization, with which business can be operated, developed and managed. Business capabilities capture all the
relevant elements together, so that they can be easily understood, shared and communicated.
Capability-Based development approach supports e.g. implementation of large business transformation programs
and/or digital transformations. The focus of business capabilities is on the core of the business: what is needed in
an organization so that it can execute its business according to its strategic goals.
Business capabilities are realized by the resources of the organization. When focusing on business capabilities,
there is no distinction between business and IT. Instead, there is only one approach that combines both business
and IT together: the business capability-based development approach.
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With business capabilities, it can be understood clearly why an organization is like it is,
and why it works as it works.
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7. Reference material
1. ArchiMate specification (v. 3.2), Open Group, 2022, link
2. ArchiMate User Community link
3. TOGAF (v.10), Business Capabilities version 2 (Business Capability Guide), Open Group, 2022, link
4. TOGAF (v.10), Value Streams (Value Stream Guide), Open Group, 2022, link
5. BIZBOK(R) by the Business Architecture Guild, link
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Figure 61: BIAN (Banking Industry Architecture Network) Business Capabilities Top Level View.
7.2.2 IT4IT
Open Group IT4IT reference architecture Capability Map for IT organizations.
7.2.3 IT-CMF
IT-CMF capability maturity framework for IT organizations.
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