Business Capability Map

What the business is able to do, arranged as a stable nested hierarchy of abilities with no processes, systems or org units on it.

Type Structural View Stage Discovery Topic Capability Mapping Area Business Architecture

flowchart TB
  subgraph core["Customer-Facing"]
    direction LR
    c1["Customer<br/>Management"]
    c2["Product &<br/>Catalogue"]
    c3["Order<br/>Capture"]
    c4["Fulfilment"]
  end
  subgraph enable["Enabling"]
    direction LR
    e1["Pricing &<br/>Promotion"]
    e2["Inventory<br/>Management"]
    e3["Payments &<br/>Settlement"]
    e4["Returns &<br/>Claims"]
  end
  subgraph support["Supporting"]
    direction LR
    s1["Finance &<br/>Accounting"]
    s2["Human<br/>Resources"]
    s3["Procurement"]
    s4["Risk &<br/>Compliance"]
  end

What it is

A stable, exhaustive, non-overlapping picture of what an organisation is able to do, expressed as nouns. Capabilities do not change when the org chart changes, when a system is replaced, or when a process is redesigned — which is precisely what makes the map useful as a coordinate system to hang other things on.

There are no arrows. The absence of arrows is deliberate and is the fastest way to tell this artifact from a process model.

When you produce it

At the start of anything that spans more than one department: a portfolio rationalisation, a post-merger integration, a target operating model, a multi-year platform strategy. It is the substrate you later colour in — with cost, with system count, with maturity, with duplication.

Who reads it

Executives, because it is in their language and has no technology on it. Enterprise architects, who use it as the index for everything else. Finance, once you overlay spend on it and it becomes an argument.

What good looks like

Levels one and two only for an executive conversation; level three exists but lives in the appendix.
Every label is a noun phrase — "Order Capture", not "Capture Orders".
Mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive at each level. If two boxes overlap, one of them is a process.
Stable enough that last year's version is still mostly right.

Common mistakes

Drawing the org chart. If the boxes match department names, you have mapped the organisation, not its capabilities, and it will be obsolete at the next reorganisation.
Drawing the value stream. Sequence and flow belong to a different artifact.
Going to level four. Nobody reads it and it takes three months.
Leaving it uncoloured. An uncoloured capability map is a taxonomy. It only becomes a decision tool when you heat-map something onto it.