A Comparative Analysis of Using the Capability Notion for Congruent Business and Information Systems Engineering

The notion of capability has been gaining a growing attention in the business and information system (IS) engineering community due to a number of reasons: it facilitates focus on business investments, it can be used as a baseline for business planning, and it directly leads to service specification and design. It is not however widely known to what extent capability is considered in different modeling approaches, how it is defined, and what purpose it fulfills. This article analyzes how the notion of capability is included in the frameworks spanning from business-oriented such as Business Architecture and Business Value Modeling, to the alignment-oriented represented by Enterprise Architecture (EA), and Enterprise Modeling (EM). The results of the analysis have shown that capability has widespread presence in the frameworks and that its conceptual meaning is largely similar, while the intentions and the mechanisms of its use differ, which raises stimulating opportunities for new contributions and improvements in the field.