Why are business capabilities critical to your firm? More importantly, how do you articulate the criticality of business capabilities? In the last several years, business capability mapping has emerged as a critical concept for modeling an enterprise and defining the fundamental essence in foundational terms. Business capabilities are like Lego blocks which encapsulate what a business does to a sufficient level of abstraction and a finer standard of decomposition.

Business capabilities are definitely worth the buzz as they are the fountainhead elements from which many other things flow. They complete the business definition.

Here are a few reasons business architecture, in general, and business capability mapping, in particular, has emerged as core enterprise modeling technique.

Business Capabilities Importance and Value:

• Business capabilities are intuitive and logical, thus providing an intellectually consistent framework
• Business capabilities are stable and long-term, thus laying a foundation that is not volatile and ephemeral
• Business capability mapping can be the common language between business and technology
• When expressed as a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive set, business capabilities can capture an enterprise’s end-to-end and multidimensional blueprint.
• Capability-based funding (rather than project-based funding) can help evolve capabilities that matter, not siloed functionality.
• Capability-centric requirements can contribute to minimizing overlap and redundancy.
• When juxtaposed against various parameters to generate heat maps, capabilities can provide insights to make informed and intelligent decisions, for example, by identifying gaps to achieve a strategy.
• Business capabilities can inform and influence the modularity and granularity of the IT services landscape.

Business capabilities may not be a panacea to what ails the business/IT relationship, but they are as close to a bridge as possible. Indeed, business capabilities matter! So how do you view the importance of business capabilities importance in your company?