Business Capabilities with relationships to other Business Capabilities, or simply nested?

[Ian Jessop]

We are beginning to build out our application portfolio and are creating the business capabilities that the company has defined. In the CSDM model do the different levels of nested business capabilities have relationships to each other (Provided By: Provides or similar) or are they simply nested and referenced in the Business Capabilities table as belonging to a parent capability?

The issue comes into play as teams would like to visualize the relationship (via a decency map) of the infra all the way up the stack to the application services, business applications, and ultimately into the capabilities provided. 

[Roger Dingus3 · Accepted solution]

Hello Ian,

Business capabilities are intended to be related to other business capabilities via the parent relationship. A hierarchy of capabilities is supported by the CSDM model.

As long as you have the relationships right between the leaf node business capability to the business application(s) (provides::provided by) and the relationship between business application and application service(s) (consumes::consumed by) and you have your infrastructure related to application services (via service mapping ideally), then you should be able to see the entire infrastructure stack up to business capabilities.

There are reports and such available with CMDB Health, CMDB Query Builder and on the CSDM Data Foundations dashboard to help you with those relationships.

Hope that helps!

Roger Dingus

[Mark Bodman]

The Business Capabilities were implemented as CI's so they could be related to others as part of the overall model.  In architecture terms, they are part of the Business Architecture or Strategy domain, depending on what framework you are looking at.  

Our initial use-case for them was Capability Based Planning, as discussed on this thread.  That won't preclude you from leveraging them in other contexts as well.  Just be mindful that the relationships you choose to implement need to be managed, and the use cases well defined otherwise that extra information can create more noise in the system.

I recommend looking at framework like the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge for well-documented uses outside Capability planning.  Also EA frameworks like Archimate and TOGAF leverage them too.  Also look at how partners like Ins-Pi support our Business Capability in their products as well, mostly in modeling and strategic planning as well.