What is Business Capability Mapping?

What is Business Capability Mapping?

First of all, understanding what Business Capabilities mean before mapping it down would be more suitable. Business Capability Mapping and Business Capability, as a concept, are “mediators” between business strategies and business execution. That is, Business Capabilities are the ways a company employ in order to attain their goals. The goals are defined by Business Strategies, and making the actual work to get there is Business Execution. Business Capability is a definitive concept of how the execution benefits reaching the goals. It emphasizes what is being done, rather than how it’s being done.

That being the case, Business Capability Mapping is the evaluative and critical method to visualize and analyze these interrelations between Business Strategies and Business Execution. Business Capability Mapping bridges a gap between these two in order to facilitate making corporate decisions with grounded data and analysis.

Business Capability Mapping may also get associated with Enterprise Architecture. Enterprise Architecture is the process of forming the IT landscape of a company that fits best to the business goals. As IT infrastructure is quite possibly one of the most important elements of a company, Enterprise Architecture and Business Capabilities have a lot to do with each other. The first one shapes how IT helps attain business goals, and the second one studies this process. Enterprise Architecture is a very crucial aspect of IT management, and it would help any business to learn about it more from here.

How to Create a Business Capability Map?

Creating a Business Capability Map is a process that requires profound knowledge about how a company actually performs its job with all the different departments working in harmony. So, a business architect could be the title that fits best to the task of building a Business Capability Map. Maybe difficult from time to time to conduct, very valuable insight into a business will be generated once the Business Capability Mapping finishes.

So, what are tips to create a Business Capability Map?

1. Single out every department.
2. Study each of them and create a list of their aims. For example, HR aims to optimize the workload by hiring absolute-fit employees. Taking help from department heads would greatly benefit this process.
3. Take a look at the people and their titles in a department, then note down what are their functions for the department.
4. Connect these functions with the department’s aims.
5. Analyze if these connections are valuable for the overall business goals.

Though the questions and the roadmap might change from business to business, approaches are similar. The focus is on “what this company is able to do now” and “if these actions align with the overall goals”. In this sense, Business Capability Mapping works with Business Strategy Alignment, too. Feel free to find out more about Business Strategy Alignment and Application Strategy Alignment.

How does Application Portfolio Management Benefit Business Capability Mapping?

In order to understand the capabilities, there should be means that make these capabilities possible. Onboarding, for example, is an HR capability. To conduct efficient onboarding processes, companies need software applications today. Once all the departments are accounted for and compiled with their capabilities, analyzing how the software applications used in these departments would bring about a picture facilitating the calculation of the overall capability. In that sense, Application Portfolio Management could really benefit a Business Capability Mapping process.

But how does APM methodology be of importance for Business Capability Mapping, exactly?

1. APM monitors and analyses every single application in each department of a company
2. APM reveals business values of these applications that actually realize the capabilities of a company
3. The quality level of the business capabilities can be matched with applications in use
4. An overall alignment of capabilities with the software can be built

Find more about Application Portfolio Management here.