Capabilities in Enterprise Architecture

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/ea-matters/capabilities-in-enterprise-architecture-59560?utm_content=buffer4f59a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

There is no recognized Capabilities framework in EA. Not to my knowledge, anyhow. Moreover there is still no agreement on what a capability is. The term has too many different meanings.

Hence, I would rather avoid the term "capability".

There are though a few business process maps around people search inspiration from but they consist, in my view, of a indiscriminate mix of end to end processes, business functions and eventually capabilities.

See though a comparison of a few known business process approaches at  

http://www.bptrends.com/publicationfiles/03-11-2011-ART-Comparion%20of%20business%20modelling%20approaches%20to%20GODS-Grigoriu-ph.pdf

In any case, a capability is usually more than a mere component of an enterprise architecture but it is a composition of more of processes, resources  and skills organised to deliver in concert the "capability".

Hence I see capabilities  as services rather than architecture components.
Capabilties are a good way to look at the EA on specific concerns.

Imagine a telecom company. Its capabilities are to deliver voice and data servicies (broken down in many sub-kinds) plus marketing, sales and customer service capabilities. 

And these are customer related capabilities, services in fact because there are many other internally delivering capabilities.

Each of these capabilities is delivered by a process, a few adequate technology systems and skilled people. It is not really an EA node. For instance the voice service is delivered over many network nodes (such as MSC, BSC, BSs, HLRs) and many connections, links and protocols.

So capability denotes what an enterprise can do. Yet a capability does not describe the how and the what.   

The capability can be shown as a View (an aspect or a filter) through the enterprise architecture that shows how the voice service works for instance, over many nodes and links of an architecture.

See more on EA here:  http://www.slideshare.net/Grigoriu/enterprise-architecture-in-3-minutes-or-so-v1

To illustrate  how the enterprise delivers voice, data, marketing, sales, customer services... one first needs to develop the EA showing nodes in interconnections.

EA is more than a simple capability list. Capabilities are just a way to illustrate the enterprise functionality.