What is a capability
Business Capability
A business capability refers to an organisation’s ability to perform a specific business function or activity. It can be thought of as a high-level description of what the organisation needs to do, what it excels at, or what differentiates it from others.
For example, all companies need the capability to manage their finances, hire, retain and reward their employees. Whilst their capability to manage the supply chain, manufacture, market or sell products could differentiate them.
Business capabilities can be defined in terms of the value they provide to the organisation and its stakeholders, and can be mapped to the business value chain.
Technical Capability
A technical capability on the other hand refers to an organisation’s ability to perform a specific technical task or activity. Technical capabilities provide a description of the organisation’s technical infrastructure, tools, and resources. Technical capabilities are defined in terms of the enabling technologies and tools that are used to support business capabilities.
For example, a company might have a technical capability for data analytics, software development, or network infrastructure management.
In essence, business capabilities are focused on what a company does, while technical capabilities are focused on the how.
Summary
There is a two way relationship between technical and business capabilities, where new technical capabilities can enable more efficient, enhanced, or new business capabilities and new business capabilities may require new, refined or enhanced technical capabilities.
Within this context it is important to remember the value derived to the business as a whole, including internal and external stakeholders as well as the end customers or consumers.
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
It can also be argued that both business and technical capabilities are essentially just business capabilities, and at a macro level it’s hard to disagree but if we think of a business capability as the ‘smallest logical unit of a business representing its unique ability to perform a self-contained work unit‘ and include technical capabilities at this level we end up in a world of pain.
Just think of something conceptually simple as this blog
A high level business capability grouping could be marketing or education which contains a number of capabilities:
- Content Creation
- Content Publication
- Manage Images
- Manage Engagement
- etc
Without also needing to cover the technical capabilities
- Word Processing
- Text Editing
- Text Formatting
- Spell Check
- Image Manipulation
- Web Hosting
- Site Security
- Domain Management
- etc.
All of which will most likely support multiple business capabilities.
Despite the need for these capabilities they do not help our understanding of what is important to the business at a higher level, it doesn’t mean they aren’t important and dont need to be managed and maintained effectively, they just add noise to the overall objectives of the organisation.
We will look a bit deeper into this when we start to explore capability mapping.