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