Overview of business capability planning
Capability-based planning directs toward planning, designing, and delivering effective plans of action to improve business capabilities in a business enterprise. The effective implementation of capability-based planning lies with the roles of business personas such as the business owner, application portfolio owner, and capability planner in understanding the existing capabilities and in planning to fill the technical gaps.
Starting with the Xanadu release, the business capability module has been deprecated from Enterprise Architecture (formerly Application Portfolio Management). However, if you’re an existing user of Enterprise Architecture (formerly Application Portfolio Management), you can still use the business capability module. If you’re a new activation user, the business capability module isn’t available.
You can leverage the same features by using the Enterprise Architecture Workspace. To learn more, see Exploring business capabilities.
Capability-based planning is a mechanism to better understand how to map strategic plans to your investments. If your capabilities are well-defined, then your organization structure aligns to those capabilities, because the capability defines what the organization does.
Business capability is a configuration item (CI) that helps to understand how the business capability is supported by the related applications and services.
Capability-based planning is structured as a hierarchy and supports up to six levels of capabilities in its series, which means a parent capability can have six levels of sub-capabilities beneath its level. However, a capability in each level of the hierarchy can have as many capabilities as its siblings at its own level and each one can have one-to-many relationships between the levels.
Personas governing capability based planning
Following are the personas with appropriate roles to use capability-based planning:
- Business owner
As a business owner it is important that you perceive the existing capabilities and work out strategies to identify the areas that need investments to plan for better allocation of expenses on projects.
- Application portfolio owner
As an application portfolio owner, you have to identify those capabilities that impact your business applications and address them, so that the business applications function effectively.
- Capability planner
As a capability planner, you have to establish capabilities in the light of the industry norms of applying procedures that have been termed as a best practice, being most effective and yielding the best results.
What to do next
Use the capability map for planning investments in applications.