A Method for Business Capability Dependency Analysis

Business capabilities are a key element of a modern Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) approach. They are the core component of a business architecture and essential for communication between business and IT. There is an enormous interest among academics and practitioners reflected in a growing number of publications on definition, use cases, and experiences from case studies. However, due to the innovative character of business capability approaches, many issues have not been subject to structured research yet. One topic that has not been addressed so far, is the analysis of dependencies between business capabilities, which is a crucial aspect for the integration of new business capabilities. This paper presents a three-phase method to systematically identify dependences between business capabilities and to other elements of the Enterprise Architecture (EA). We built this method on the assignment of the business entities to business capabilities. Based on existing visualizations, we developed a business entity map and an information ownership map to support the analysis. We applied a design science approach to develop the method which has been tested during application in the three companies. Additionally, we illustrate the method with a case study from the telecommunication industry.