Business Capabilities
What a business does, stated stably and independent of implementation.
4 to work through
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intermediate
A travel platform's teams describe their work as "search", "book", "pay", "support". Are these capabilities or processes, and why does the distinction matter architecturally?
2 min answer -
intermediate Multiple choice
What is the difference between a business capability and a business process, and why does it matter when drawing service boundaries?
2 min answer -
advanced
A retailer validates and stores a customer delivery address in three places: checkout, the logistics planner, and support tooling. Each implementation is defensible on its own terms and each team resists change. About 3% of orders fail first-time delivery for address-quality reasons. Walk me through how you would approach this.
3 min answer -
advanced
How can a business-model choice create a technical constraint that nobody funds, and how should an architect surface that before it becomes an outage?
3 min answer
3 terms in this topic
Business Capabilities
What the business does, expressed independently of how it does it — the most stable frame available for drawing system boundaries.
practiceCapability Maturity Assessment
Rating each business capability on how well it is currently performed, so investment can be directed at the gap between importance and maturity.
conceptUnfunded Technical Consequence
A computational or operational difficulty implied by a business-model decision but never costed, because the decision was evaluated on commercial mer…
Neighbouring topics
Business Architecture
General material on the business side of architecture.
Capability Mapping
Overlaying systems onto capabilities to expose duplication and gaps.
Business Processes
How work actually flows, including the handoffs nobody documented.
Value Streams
End-to-end delivery of an outcome, and where the waiting happens.
Domain Boundaries
Where the language of the business changes, and services should too.
Stakeholder Analysis
Who is affected, what they need, and who can block you late.
Product Thinking
Treating platforms and services as products with users and a lifecycle.
Business KPIs
The numbers a design is ultimately judged against.
Regulatory Constraints
Non-negotiable requirements that remove design options entirely.
Organisational Constraints
Team structure, skills and budget cycles as architectural inputs.
Time to Market
The constraint that dominates most products, and how to trade against it.
Build vs Buy
Differentiation versus table stakes, priced over five years.
Business Cases
Expressing an architecture proposal in the currency that gets funded.
Operating Models
How delivery, platform and governance functions fit together.
Team Topologies
Stream-aligned, platform, enabling and complicated-subsystem teams.
Platform as a Product
Adoption earned rather than mandated, with an owner and a roadmap.
Outcome Measurement
Knowing whether the thing you built achieved what it promised.
Portfolio Prioritisation
Choosing between investments with incomparable benefits.
Business Continuity
What the business does while the system is unavailable.