Business Capability Model Overview
Links to articles from series:
Business Capability Modelling Overview (article 1)
Business Capability in-depth explanation (article 2)
Business Capability Model and its use cases (article 3)
Business Capability Modelling workshop recipes (article 4)
Business Capability is an abstraction
When I was young, I spent endless hours with my friends playing old-school tabletop Role Playing Games like Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, or Cyberpunk 2020. We used to meet late evening in my or my friend’s house, lit candles, set a tape recorder with some atmospheric music, sat in a circle, rolled dice, and started to tell some incredible stories. It was a fun time.
Nowadays, tabletop role-playing games were superseded by role-playing video games; you are probably familiar with some of them: World of Warcraft, Fallout, Final Fantasy, or Cyberpunk 2077 (in fact, based on Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop role-playing game).
Both types of role-playing games, tabletop, and video have one thing in common – player character and its character sheet. Every character is described by its skills and abilities. Examples of such skills are: outdoor survival, drive, entertain, intimidate, melee; as you can see, those are not real life, detailed skills or abilities but abstractions of those. Boxing, knife fighting, wrestling are accurate skills, but all of them could be described as melee ability.
Why were role-playing games designed this way? A human being (or dwarf being) is an extremely complex creature. Explaining it on one sheet of paper cannot be done without simplifications or abstractions. Using abstractions like melee or entertain, you can create a comprehensive and exhaustive description of your character. Moreover, you can avoid situations when your character’s evolution in time will force you to rewrite his character sheet completely.
Business, the same way as orc or elf, is a very complex creature. If you would like to express all possible details of it in one model, it would take a book set of a size similar to Britannica Encyclopaedia to make it exhaustive. Such a big model is neither useful nor pragmatic. Business Capability Model is a model created to describe a business or organization from the perspective of its abilities, however, simplified to the level of actionability. To make it work, the method’s creators decided not to focus on real abilities or skill sets of businesses but abstractions of those. The idea of making abilities abstract is the same idea that guided the authors of role-playing games. Let’s take a look at some examples to make it more clear.
The hierarchical model of a business.
A business could be described with abilities like marketing, accounting, production planning. In the same way, as with the character skills, these are abstractions built around some desired outcome. For example, marketing is an ability to reach out to potential customers, make them aware of our product, and lure them into buying it. Marketing capability does not assume how we will exactly achieve it; we could send emails, call potential clients, or distribute leaflets.
The Business Capability Model is a model of the company that consists of many business capabilities that are formed hierarchically. Capabilities on every level have different granularity. Every level should be an exhaustive description of the whole enterprise. The Business Capability Model is a building block of Business Architecture that supports Business Strategy.
The missing link between the business domain and DDD
Business Capability Model is a missing link between the business domain and domain-driven design concept called Bounded Context. It is a more precise and tangible version of the subdomain definition. You can use it for mergers and acquisitions to determine overlaps. You can use it to analyze and reduce redundancy between your systems in the corporate landscape. You can use it as a complementary exercise to Event Storming or Domain Storytelling to perform domain and solution decomposition. Possibilities (or maybe capabilities 🙂 ) are endless!
Business Capability Modelling – a workshop formula
The workshop formula to develop a Business Capability Model is called Business Capability Modelling; it is a complex exercise that requires particular skills and knowledge from the facilitator. If you are interested in further details, I strongly encourage you to follow the rest of this article series.
Key takeaways:
- Business Capability is an abstraction
- The Business Capability Model is a hierarchical model of a business
- The Business Capability Model is a missing link between the business domain and DDD
- Business Capability Modelling is a workshop formula
Links to articles from series:
Business Capability Modelling Overview (article 1)
Business Capability in-depth explanation (article 2)
Business Capability Model and its use cases (article 3)
Business Capability Modelling workshop recipes (article 4)
