Business Capability Decomposition — Part 2

In the previous part-1 on Business capability decomposition we tried to identify the different size of the organization and its potential capabilities. When we are building business capabilities we need to make sure the people, process, technology and resources are well aligned.

Identifying the business capabilities helps to have a unified thought process for the stakeholders to have consistent purview of the needs. This also helps to identify the domain boundaries and domain interactions with a specific context.

According to Ulrich Homann “A business capability is a particular ability or capacity that a business may possess or exchange to achieve a specific purpose or outcome.”

When we are building systems its important to understand what should be the outcome of a specific business capabilities and how its going to add value. This would help to prioritize and focus better on the solutioning.

Typically business capabilities can be named after noun-verb format. For example “Customer Relationship Management, Distribution Management”, etc., Yet its important that it needs to be understood by business people easily and resonate their thought process. Now lets look at the potential business capability required for the Driving School SaaS Product.

The following is potential or indicative list of capabilities a Driving Schools might posses:

• Learners Management — Ability to engage learners, Work with the learners on their driving schedules, evaluating and improving learners capabilities, establish curriculum and track the learners progress, and learners learning effectiveness, providing mock tests, Follow up for upgrades in learning, allocation of training resources such as simulator
• Trainer Management — Ability to Schedule the drivers for learning sessions, Establish train the trainer programs, On-demand certified trainers engagement, Trainer-Learner mapping, etc.,
• Learners Certification Management — Tracking License Applications, Providing updates and notifications to learners, Co-ordinating with Statutory authorities, medical authorities, fixing appointment with doctors for learners, etc.,
• Training Resource Management — Scheduling simulators, Planning and optimizing utilization of simulators across multiple sites, Simulator installation, Simulator maintenance, etc.,
• Business Management — Tracking Marketing, leads, Billing, Payroll, HR, multiple sites, branches, payments, finance, etc.

Now we can see that these capabilities are the core to manage the SaaS product of Driving school. Yet these could be more like a representation of departments of the organization. They might also cut across each departments. For gaining the right level of involvement of the stakeholders and to identify where the SaaS product build the solution for scalability, replicability across business we need to have logical structure to the same. Its also important to identify their level of influence in the overall business. TOGAF recommends two approaches for arriving a logical structure to the business capabilities, they are:

1. Stratification
2. Leveling

In the next part of the Business capabilities component mapping we will see how to use these approaches in the Driving School SaaS product. Meanwhile do comment on what are the other potential capabilities Driving School SaaS could have as unique value proposition.