Modeling Business Capabilities in Enterprise Architecture Practice: The Case of Business Capability Models

ABSTRACT

Business capability modeling is a narrow domain of enterprise architecture modeling, which currently remains insufficiently explored. This study identifies nine general business capability modeling approaches and corresponding usage scenarios of business capability models most of which have not been systematically described or even mentioned in the existing literature. This study represents arguably the first intentional effort to explore the practical usage of business capability models in organizations for the purposes of aligning business and IT.

KEYWORDS:

• System Modeling
• enterprise architecture (EA)
• EA modeling
• business capability modeling
• business capability models (BCMs)
• usage

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the support by Researchers Supporting Project number (RSP2023/309), King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Importantly, organizations were selected for inclusion in our sample before we had a chance to know whether they actually used BCMs in their EA practices. As it turned out later, many of them did not use BCMs (see Appendix C). Although the inclusion of organizations not using BCMs may seem irrelevant to the purposes of this study, their inclusion allowed judging about the prevalence of BCMs across the industry and also raise the question of the limits of their practical applicability, as discussed later

2. Under “mini-case studies” we mean targeted studies of organizations that do not fully meet the criteria of full-fledged case studies, e.g. multiple interviews and comprehensive documentation analysis (Yin, 2017)

3. These numbers indicate permanent IT staff count plus an unknown, variable or hard-to-estimate number of partners, vendors and outsourcers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Svyatoslav Kotusev

Svyatoslav Kotusev focuses on studying enterprise architecture practices in organizations since 2013. He is an author of the book The Practice of Enterprise Architecture: A Modern Approach to Business and IT Alignment (now in its second edition), many articles and other materials on enterprise architecture that appeared in various academic journals and conferences, industry magazines and online outlets (visit http://kotusev.com for more information). Currently, Svyatoslav is an associate professor at HSE University. He received his PhD in information systems from RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

Ayed Alwadain

Ayed Alwadain is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department, the Community College, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia. He received his PhD in 2014, from Queensland University of Technology in Australia. In his research, he focuses on Enterprise Architecture, Service Management and Engineering, Business Process Management, Requirement Engineering and Data Science and Big Data. Ayed has published his work at many international conferences and journals such as Data & Knowledge Engineering and the International Journal of Intelligent Information Technologies.