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Align with Business Strategy

Align strategy of business capability improvement and execution.

Creating an agreed and realistic strategic roadmap that is aligned to business strategy is hard. Most---if not all---large enterprises are complex and consist of many lines of business (LOBs) where each business has its own "business identity" and therefore its own long term strategy. Each of these organizational divisions has its own agenda.

The Use Case Tree is the single artifact that all lines of business can talk to.

Business Capability Map

At the highest levels, the Use Case Tree will end up being identical---or almost identical---to a business capability map.

Here's an example of a simplified capability map of an insurance company (taken from the article mentioned as source 1 below):

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Most large organizations have an Enterprise Architecture or Business Architecture department that works on these models but in many cases:

  • these capability maps are just maintained as pictures or spreadsheets and therefore
    • often out of sync with reality
    • not really fully ingrained in the hearts and minds of the workforce
  • they are usually:
    • not represented in production-level systems and if they are then they are:
    • not represented in user interfaces (text may look the same but doesn't dynamically change when the capability map changes)
    • not represented in APIs (parameters, returned data structures etc)
    • not represented in data models
  • they have bad linkage with similar hierarchical structures such as:
    • the organizational unit structure and reporting lines
    • the product and services catalog
    • the actual business processes
    • the actual internal data, technology, products and services supply chains

Next-level Capability Map

The Use Case Tree serves as the next level in Business Capability Mapping where each capability gets broken down into smaller capabilities each of which ends up as an executable model --- or component or model so you will --- in the EKG itself.

Sources

  1. Marc Lankhorst, Sven van Dijk, What are Business Capabilities & How to Identify them?
  2. Business Capability Models: Why You Might Be Missing Out on Better Business Outcomes
Author: Jacobus Geluk

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