In the contemporary business world, leveraging technology to its full potential is not just an option; it is a necessity. However, achieving alignment between business strategies and technology implementations is often challenging. Business Capabilities (BCs) serve as a pivotal mechanism in this regard. By providing a common language and serving as anchor points, BCs help cross-map various organizational components, thereby driving alignment between business and IT.

Understanding Business Capabilities

Before delving into BCs’ role in bridging the business-IT gap, it’s crucial to grasp what they are. A Business Capability (BC) defines an organization’s fundamental abilities to achieve its strategic objectives. It describes what a company can do without specifying how it does it. For instance, “customer service” might be a capability of a business. In contrast, the process of delivering this service—via a call center, online chat, or face-to-face—constitutes the operations aspect.

BCs are considered foundational building blocks of an enterprise as they portray a high-level overview of what the company does. They remain constant over time, regardless of changes in processes or technologies.

Business Architecture Drives Business and IT Alignment

BCs serve as effective tools to align business strategy with technology implementation in three key ways.

1. Creating a Common Language: BCs provide a shared lexicon that allows business and IT professionals to communicate effectively. By focusing on “what” a business does rather than “how” it does it, BCs enable fruitful discussions around business needs, strategic priorities, and how technology can enable these.

2. Mapping against Value Streams, Applications, and Backlog Items: BCs act as anchors, allowing cross-mapping between different components of an organization. They link strategic objectives with operational details, offering a holistic enterprise view. This helps identify overlaps, gaps, and inefficiencies, thereby enabling better strategic planning and decision-making.

3. Driving Change and Innovation: BCs provide a high-level overview of the company’s abilities, making it easier to identify areas of strength and areas requiring improvement. Organizations can better target innovation and change initiatives by analyzing these capabilities, ensuring that technology investments are directly tied to business outcomes.

Example in Action

Consider an e-commerce enterprise aiming to improve its customer service capability. The business and IT teams initially struggle to align their visions. The business team seeks enhanced customer satisfaction, while the IT team focuses on upgrading specific technologies.

BCs bridge this gap by providing a common language – “improving customer service.” Both teams can now identify the specific value streams, applications, and backlog items that contribute to this capability. Perhaps there is a value stream around resolving customer queries, an application that tracks customer interactions, and backlog items concerning new features for customer interaction.

By cross-mapping these against the “customer service” capability, they can identify redundancies, inefficiencies, and gaps. They might realize the need for a new chatbot application to handle frequent queries or understand that the existing tracking system fails to capture crucial customer data. This common understanding drives effective strategic planning and innovation, ultimately aligning business strategy and IT implementation.

Conclusion

BCs are the unsung heroes in business-IT alignment, offering a unique solution to a pervasive challenge. BCs act as the cornerstone to bridge the business and IT gap by providing a common language and enabling cross-mapping. They ensure that business and technology are in sync and facilitate strategic planning, drive innovation, and deliver sustainable competitive advantage. As such, any organization seeking to leverage technology effectively must understand and utilize the power of Business Capabilities.