EA Modelling Steps for Business Capability Map:

Anand Nerurkar
Aug 13, 2023
4 min read

Industry Supported Tools

· Sparx Enterprise Architect – (Tech Users)

o Comprehensive modelling environment to let users collaborate

o Create Architecture models in central enterprise repository

o Metamodel across EA domains

· Sparx Prolaborate (Business/Executive)

o Web based sharing and collaboration platform to curate models

o It makes use of EA repository and metamodel

o Integrate it with MS office

o Upload existing capability excel sheet and convert it to EA model

o To let curated models & dashboards to be shared with business/executive

o Due Diligence & insights with various dashboard in the form of

o Bubble chart

o Pie chart

o Roadmap

o Heatmap

o Landing Charts

· ABACUS

· BIZ Design

· Orbus

Setting Up EA Repository

Business Capability Map

One of the very important activity in the EA modelling for any business strategy, initiative to be completed

· High value and benefit activity in EA model

· Capture capability of our business- what we do today and what we will do in the future to support strategy

· High critical capability, supporting capability

· Setting target, KPI, metrices to measure

· Mapping it with technical capability for the implementation

· Align strategy with projects, business initiative, implementation & execution with downstream team

· Mapping it with Value stream to deliver capability

· Support standard based implementation

o TOGAF

o BizBOK

o ArchiMate

Each business capability will be having certain attributes like

Criticality high/medium/low

Environment dev/test/prod

Financial impact critical/high/medium/low

Cost $50 millions

Category – L0/L1/L2

We can analysis further on this and present data to business by applying bubble chart or heatmap and drive the decision further regarding investment, improvement, retire, rearchitect etc

We can also import existing capability data in the form excel sheet to EA and then use this data as basis for further capability analysis.

Normally each capability may have 3-6 levels ,level 0/1 is mostly for senior leadership to understand high level for the business capabilities, provide funding for new capability, which initiative to take further. These will be further decomposed into sub-capability further.

For example: Business Capability Map

Heat Mapping

· Help identify opportunities for business improvement or investment.

· It visually highlights business capabilities that are performing at a sub-optimal level, or that might not exist in a form that is required to meet some future strategic need.

· show a range of different perspectives in terms of

o Maturity

o Effectiveness

o Performance

o Value contribution of each capability to the business

o Cost contribution of each capability to the business

Heat Mapping- Capability Perspective

Yellow – some issues, but low priority

Red – need immediate attention

Green – stable

Purple- new business capability business need to develop

Agent Management (purple) is a new business capability that the business wishes to develop. Business leaders can then take this information and ensure that investments and project initiatives are prioritized and funded at an appropriate level to bring those business capabilities shown in purple, red, or yellow up to the desired level of maturity.

Depending on criteria, we can have different heat mapping perspective as below

· Strategic contribution

· Revenue contribution

· Cost contribution

· Performance

· Criticality

· Effectiveness

Modelling ( Harvesting Business capabilities)

We can create it from the scratch or we can import it from our existing capability excel sheet data

Let us import existing capability data in excel to EA tool as below

This is Excel sheet that we need to import

In EA tool, locate EA model-business capability-open existing capability as below

Strategy- L0 capability- linked to -> Strategy business management-L1 capability

This does not have any L2 capability. We will import existing L2 capability data here

Select capabilty

Click preview & import into EAS model

Since we have l1 capability connection, we need to import that into our existing l1 capability to connect

Click advanced setting -select l1 capability as below

Click yes

It import data and connect to l1 capability

Now we can see Marketing capability has l2 capability as below, it mean data is imported successfully.

To see it, right click on marketing-insert related elements

Just enable heat map as below

Check apply auto color -click ok – will generate heat map based on critical statusto find out which capability are high/medium/low

Metamodel at strategy/motivational layer

Metmodel at business layer

Once we have business capability map and corresponding EA model , we need to perform due diligence , that is where we make use of landscape charts with heat map applied to find out l2 capability with required capability.

Due Diligence & Insights using capabilities

Value stream-capability-applications- cross architectural layer view

Let us say we need to further analyze business capability w.r.t. certain parameter say value or cost or value perceived by the customer. Financial impact,

We could use bubble chart and drive these with attribute to find out which capability are value driver etc. How does capability stack up in terms of value, financial impacts.

Prolaborate is web based -sharing and collaboration platform that integrate with your EA modelling tool and present those valuable insights to business users in the form

Of dashboards as below

· Bubble chart

· Pie chart

· Heat map

· Roadmap

· Landscape chart

· Value stream-capability-application view

Create dashboards