Value

Contribution to the EKG

The Business Capability Map enables an enterprise to structure their Enterprise Knowledge Graph. Each capability is a candidate to become a use case for the EKG.

A well-designed mature EKG is a facade in front of all technical and organizational silos which means that---without any further structure---users do not experience the negative effects of these silos anymore. In many ways that may be a good thing but having silos---or different perspectives---can also be necessary. The EKG allows an organization to rethink their silos without being held back by their current data or technology landscape (or "technical debt").

The Business Capability Map is the ideal initial structure for the new EKG "silos". Business Capability Maps are usually rather coarse-grained and visualized in a three-level hierarchy whereas the structure of the EKG goes much further than that. Translating each capability to a use case is a good start but each of these use cases can be further broken down into smaller use cases where each use case becomes a highly reusable component of the EKG. This leads to a hierarchical structure---a taxonomy so you will---of all use cases, also called "the Use Case Tree" (UCT). This use case tree, at the higher levels, corresponds with the Business Capability Map and allows a business and its executives to "own" and control all the various parts of their EKG.

Contribution to the Enterprise

As a business/IT transformation enabler, capabilities may provide certain benefits to enterprises:

• Capabilities provide business with a common language.
  Capabilities offer business professionals and C-level executives a common understanding of which areas of an enterprise they need to address. The larger the enterprise, the more useful this idea is since business issues and strategy may revolve around many business units, lines of business, business processes, or even enterprise boundaries.
• Capabilities may enable more precise investments.
  Measuring the ROI of investment projects can be very difficult as the results might be spread across a myriad of different LOBs or business units. Instead of reconciling results from all these different places, one could merely look at the resources being allocated at a certain capability and this may allow business executives to have better estimates of the impact of their investments on the enterprise as a whole.
• Capabilities serve as a baseline for strategic planning, change management and impact analysis.
  By shifting the focus from business units, lines of business, IT systems and business processes to business capabilities, one is able to increase the traceability of strategic decisions into the daily operations and the business performance of the enterprise as a whole. So, capabilities serve as a starting point for tracking the impact horizontal and vertical impacts of strategic and tactical decisions from the executive team.
• Capabilities lead to better business service specification and design.
  Capabilities provide business-focused abstraction of the functionalities and information that information systems must provide. For instance, such capabilities may help in the selection or construction of services in a SOA as they directly embody business requirements.

In a few words, capabilities provide business executives the possibility to cut through the complexity inherent to most enterprises in order to make sounder decisions for strategic planning, impact analysis and investment planning. Using capabilities enables business to make decisions based on what needs to be resolved without initially dealing with the how. At the same time, it provides a way to tie the how to the results of the _what_for further validation that business efforts are delivery the expected results and for better alignment. On the other hand, the alternative to this approach involves repeating the traditional silo-focused approach of looking at hundreds or even thousands of IT systems, before being able to look at actual business actions and business results.