Business capabilities define what your business does, such as the services it provides to customers, or the operational functions it performs for employees. In contrast, business processes define how your business does these things. While business processes might change with some frequency, for example, when a particular process is automated, business capabilities are more stable over time. Capability maps allow you to hierarchically decompose the services your organization provides, and viewing your business in terms of capabilities provides a higher level view of the structure of your business.
Business capabilities can be composed of several capabilities. For example, an organization might have a Human Capital Management capability that is itself composed of a set of capabilities: Plan workforce requirements, Manage staffing, and Manage compensation and benefits .
The Manage compensation and benefits capability is itself composed of three capabilities: Manage payroll, Manage expense and reimbursement, and Manage incentives.
Business capabilities can be linked to measures which represent the target performance levels that are defined in a related strategy map. For example, the Manage expense and reimbursement capability could be linked to a measure in the overall business strategy that says that expense claims should be processed within 30 days. For more information on business strategies and measures, see the information about building strategy maps.
You can also associate a capability map to the processes that implement the capability so that you can either plan for the set of processes that will be affected by a change to the capability.
Use a business capability map to represent the network of capabilities that your business currently has, or the network of capabilities your business needs to have in order to meet the strategic goals of the organization. By comparing the difference between your actual capabilities and the capabilities you need, you can perform a gap analysis and plan for the required changes.
For example, imagine that an airline, JKAir, has decided to improve their inflight services as part of a strategy to improve customer satisfaction. One of the key initiatives to meet this goal is to provide inflight meal service, which is something JKAir has not done in the past. To plan and implement such a change, the JKAir executives perform a gap analysis, mapping their business capabilities to identify the capabilities they currently have in their customer service area, and determining what kind of capabilities they need to implement the proposed change.
For the new Offer inflight meals capability, the JKAir executives can link to the targets for performance levels, cost, and so on, that are captured in a related strategy map. The capability does not include information about how the work is performed. For example, the actual work of preparing and delivering meals could be done by an internal business unit, or by an external service provider, depending on which implementation makes sense. At this level of planning, the executives need only to specify the what and not the how. The how is modeled through the use of process maps, which outline the exact steps for delivering the related capability.