architecture is becoming a fountainhead discipline for enterprises, it is still primarily IT trying to model the business in order to meet its own needs for improved IT landscape oversight and management. Business architects tend to be highly trained IT engineers and managers with significant training, and a set of complex, IT-centric tools. There is currently a lack of focused and easy-to-use business tools to help model a business. As a result, business is often missing or peripheral to capability architecture’s definition of business.

Capstera fuses the elements of business architecture, capability mapping & management, and requirements management to help engage business in creating the picture perfect business definition. This can then be used by the business to translate strategies into actionable capability-specific roadmaps, manage overlaps across products, projects and initiatives, communicate & manage requirements with IT, and help IT manage project complexity, among other benefits.

Capstera Features & Benefits

• Craft capability models using intuitive and easy-to-use inline editing and drag-and-drop functionality that business and IT can both use without advanced business architecture training

• Compose platforms, initiatives/programs and service offerings using underlying capabilities as “Lego” blocks, thus establishing a common and MECE language between business and IT

• Collect & manage requirements by capabilities instead of trying to manage them across a large number of IT projects with poorly defined interdependencies

o Helps quickly identify conflicts & synergies, avoiding silos and unnecessary redundancy

o Fosters reuse by identifying similar capabilities, therefore also improving time-to-market

o Establishes traceability and transparency of requirements to individual capabilities

o Reduces requirements churn

• Visualize a variety of lenses and heat maps to shed light on relationships, dependencies, relevance, overlaps and gaps, such as matching high-level strategy to capability-specific objectives

• Bridge the gap between capabilities and services and therefore provide the transition from a business model to a services model

• Capture rich semantic information and attributes for each capability, which can further improve communication and integration with the business strategy

• Create value streams and upload processes to overlay the “How” with the “What”

• Draft Business Rationale, Strategy and Tactics (BuRST) to make the business strategy actionable at the capability level and to help focus on long-term capability evolution instead of yearly projects that typically generate silo’ed functionality

• Help service architects define modular and coarse grained IT services based on capability semantics and rationalize application portfolio by analyzing systems at a capability level