A business capability is a a representation of a business activity focusing only on the impact of its execution and not on the order of the operations. In doing so it forms a class of all activities with the same impact on the business domain.

(Own representation)

The business capability is based on own competencies or relies on capabilites of others. This results in two types of dependencies between capabilities: the existence dependency and the usage dependency, correspondingly.

A business capability is used for establishment of a hierarchical taxonomy of activities. In doing so, the inspection of business capabilities is usually executed for identification of activity dependencies. PDD folows this convention and uses the term business capability during the evaluation of what is the impact of the execution.

business functionality, business responsibility, business ability, //misleading:// competence, service

Business capabilites form an essential aspect of the enterprise model called business capability model.

We defined business activity as a pattern of operations producing a valueable output. The capability view on activity focuses on the impact of this business activity. In doing so, we abstract from different pattern structures (the “how” part of the execution) and concentrate on the impact to the environment (the “what” part). For example, if we want to write a letter, we could specify different patterns, one for writing it with a pen, and one for typing it on the computer. The modeled impact of both activities is - the letter is written, but the implementation of it is different.

The general idea of capability modeling is the observation, that the capabilites are not the subject of frequent changes. These are more stable than their implementations and represent main building blocks of a business domain and not a particular enterprise.

[2007, article | www]

Sehmi, A. (2007). Business Architecture Resources (MSBA / Motion).

[2007, article | www]

Eldridge, J. (2007). Why business architecture is so important to enterprise architecture.

[2005, inproceedings | www]

Beimborn, D., Martin, S. F., & Homann, U. (2005). Capability-oriented Modeling of the Firm.