Business Functions distinct from Business Capabilities

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tmacfarlane
Posts: 8
Joined: 19 Jun 2017, 02:30

Hi, I did a scan of previous posts and did not see any references to recommendations on how to model Business Functions as a seperate entity than Business Capabilities. The metamodel does not include Business Functions so would you recommend adding it the Business Conceptual Layer or the Business Logical Layer? What key metadata tags would you see as being different between the two? I am looking to populate the metamodel with both capabilties and functions and wanted to know if you the concept of business function is accounted for within how you define roles or in another attribute that is closely tied to an organizational value. Thanks.
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jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

Hi,

Thanks for your post.

Could you explain precisely what you mean by "Business Function" and what it is that you want to model using this? It might sound like a bad question but as we have encountered so many different uses of terms like this, when we're clear what it is that you need to capture, we can advise you on the best way.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
tmacfarlane
Posts: 8
Joined: 19 Jun 2017, 02:30

Hi, our mental model, which I need to reflect in the metamodel, sees the following relationship:
  • Business Capability - An ability that an organization, person, or system possesses. Capabilities are typically expressed in general and high-level terms and typically require a combination of organization, people, processes, and technology to achieve.
    Business Function - Delivers business capabilities closely aligned to an organization, but not necessarily explicitly governed by the organization.
    Business Service - Supports business capabilities through an explicitly defined interface and is explicitly governed by an organization.
Source - http://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/ ... hap03.html
Activity Models (also called Business Process Models) describe the functions associated with the enterprise's business activities, the data and/or information exchanged between activities (internal exchanges), and the data and/or information exchanged with other activities that are outside the scope of the model (external exchanges).
Source: http://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/ ... hap08.html

A lot of our internal discussions are influenced by the reality that we are a large organization with numerous individual operations spread literally across the world, so there is a tendency to speak in terms of the logical level structure used to control and manage our resources and processes (e.g., human resource management function, investment portfolio management function). Our discussions are now maturing to look at the capability first and be agnostic of the organizational structure.

In your metamodel you define a business capability as: Models the capabilities of a business or enterprise. Capabilities belong to business domains and represent the services that a business offers or requires or Business Process "areas".

The metamodel then defines a Business Domain as: Business Domain meta class from the Conceptual view of the Business Architecture. This is the top level (and least specific) construct in the Business Architecture. It provides a means of categorising business related elements independent of the context in which it is applied.

The metamodel defines Business Roles as: Business Roles are used to represent the DESIGN of the organisation, in terms of the roles that are required and how they are related. Business Roles perfom Business Processes. Business Roles are groups, departments, teams or job roles within the enterprise, representing many levels of granularity as to how the processes are performed. Roles can also own a process

This definition is closer to the concept of a functional classification but a role is still a different concept than a function.

Therefore, should I describe the missing metamodel element of Business Function as a Business Domain or should Business Function be a new element added to the metamodel?

The key requirement falls back on the value proposition of EA needing to be relevant to the needs of the client. The organization is moving toward a capability first lense in order to describe the enterprise layout but it is still organizing itself by functional groupings. I am also facing the situation where people are simply calling a capability a function since the distinction is not clear to them . This impacts the ability to further mature with a capability approach since they are still being bound by existing organizational constructs. When we start to discuss digital transformation and how cloud changes the enterprise we need to keep the existing organizational structure bias out of the discussion.

Therefore, I have the need to define the enterprise in terms of capability relationships to functional ownership.
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jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

Hi,

Your definition of Business Capability is pretty close to what we have defined in the Essential Meta Model. Business Capabilities are conceptual - they’re a “what” thing - but can be defined at any level of granularity that you need. So, you could have very coarse-grain Business Capabilities that describe a whole division, and very fine-grained Business Capabilities that give a lot of detail in terms of what organisation does.

How that Business Capability is delivered, takes us into the “how” and Business Processes, which again can be as fine-grained or coarse-grained as you need (and any mix of fine and coarse grained)

Using conceptual and logical definitions of what and - at a logical level - how the organisation operates is very useful. The specifics of how individual divisions or teams perform particular processes is captured in the Business Physical section of our meta model. However, it is useful to capture and understand how different teams perform processes differently - and that’s where mapping back to the what, the Business Capability is very powerful in highlighting variance across the organisation.

With the Business Service concept, we took the decision that the term ‘Service’ was already very much overloaded and instead use the Product Concept / Product Type / Product classes. This is straightforward for those organisations who are in manufacturing but we reduce the overloading of “service”, we concluded that service-organisations’ products are their services. Capturing these explicitly as ‘Products’ separates the terminology of the classes and hopefully makes it easier to understand (once you’ve got past that first step!)

To your questions:
Therefore, should I describe the missing metamodel element of Business Function as a Business Domain or should Business Function be a new element added to the metamodel?
To your point that Business Function describes a part of your organisation the Business Role Type class would be a good mapping as we can connect these to the Business Capabilities that the Business Role Type provides (at any level of granularity that you need). This is a conceptual thing - a what thing to which relevant Business Roles can then be mapped when it’s time to look at the design of how these capabilities will be / are being realised.

Let me know what you think

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
tmacfarlane
Posts: 8
Joined: 19 Jun 2017, 02:30

Thanks for the response. I will try to proceed with your recommendation.
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