Business Modelling

http://www.enterprise-architecture.org/business-architecture-tutorials/162-businesscapabilitymodelling

Understanding the capabilities required by your business provides a high level overview of the business and can be a very useful exercise as it allows one to take a step back and focus on what the key elements of the business are.   You can avoid getting bogged down in the details of ‘how’ things happen and concentrate on ‘what’ does (or needs to) happen.  Once you have done this it is possible to identify your key capabilities, for example, the ones that will differentiate your business and you can use this information to ensure that you focus on the areas of importance in your business, whether this is in defining new projects or ensuring business as usual delivers appropriately.

We use Business Capabilities to model the services that a business or enterprise offers or requires. These capabilities are modelled in the Business Conceptual layer and represent what the business does (or needs to do) in order to fulfil its objectives and responsibilities. 
The Business Capabilities are the top layer of the business architecture.  They belong to a Business Domain and are governed by the Business Principles of the organisation.  The capabilities are realised by a business process and performed by a role, i.e. an individual or team in the organisation.
The Business Capability is, therefore, at a higher level than a business process and is in the conceptual layer.  It represents a conceptual service that a group of processes and people, supported by the relevant application, information and underlying technology, will perform.  The capability represents the what, whereas the process and people represent the how.
Business Capabilities can themselves be broken down into supporting capabilities, if this is useful.  For example, ‘Order Fulfilment’ is a high level capability that may be broken down into further supporting capabilities such as ‘order approval’, ‘picking’, ‘packing’, ‘despatch’, ‘delivery’ and ‘returns management’, as depicted in the diagrams below.  These are all examples of capabilities, or of services, that an organisation needs to perform to enable it to fulfil its obligation to its customers.