Capability consideration in business and enterprise architecture frameworks

Abstract

The notion of capability has gained growing attention over the last few years due to a number of factors, namely, it directs business investment focus, it can be used as a baseline for business planning, and it leads to service specification and design. It is however unexplored to what extent capability is considered in different modeling approaches, how it is defined, integrated with other concepts, and what purpose it fulfills. This chapter presents how the notion of capability is included in the current Business Architecture (BA) and Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks. It shows that capability has a considerable role in the frameworks and that they share a largely similar conceptual meaning of capability while the intentions and the mechanisms of its use differ, which raises stimulating opportunities for new contributions and improvements in the field.