Skip to content

Business Capability Map

Purpose

A visual map of the business capabilities the organisation performs, with the applications supporting each one shown against it. It reframes the estate in language the business recognises, which makes it the view to take into a conversation with anyone who does not care what a hypervisor is. The on-screen subtitle reads: "Visualise applications by L1 / L2 / L3 business capabilities".

Where to find it

Assess → Business Capability Map

What you see

Cards

TOTAL APPLICATIONS, BCM MAPPED ("N% mapped"), L1 DOMAINS ("Capability domains") and UNMAPPED ("No BCM mapping").

Controls

  • Depth:: Level 1, Level 2 or Level 3.
  • Colour by:: Lifecycle Phase, Criticality, TIME Classification or Migration Status.

The screen has no grid and no forms.

Application details

Select an application on the map to open a side panel with its name and its Lifecycle, Criticality, TIME and Migration Status.

If no applications have business capabilities yet, the map reads "No applications have been mapped to business capabilities yet. Use the Application data table to assign BCM values."

Overview

An application inventory is an IT artefact. A capability map is a business one.

Capabilities are held as a hierarchy of three levels, and applications are shown grouped beneath the capability they support. The Depth: control offers the three levels, Level 1 to Level 3.

When to use this

  • In business stakeholder conversations, where application names mean nothing but capability names mean everything.
  • When prioritising migration waves, to see applications by capability, coloured by Migration Status, rather than which servers.
  • When identifying duplication, since several applications under one capability often indicates overlap worth rationalising.

Key features

Why duplication is where the money is

Applications are procured over decades, by different parts of the business, often to solve the same problem more than once. Describing the estate in the language of what the business does rather than what IT owns is what exposes that.

Capabilities served by several applications are consolidation candidates, and those opportunities are frequently the largest single saving available to a transformation programme, because they remove licence and support cost permanently rather than relocating it.

Consolidation conversations need the most time with the business

Deciding which of three overlapping applications survives is a business decision with owners on both sides of it, and it does not compress well.

Assess has four views, and each one can recommend the wrong thing on its own. See Why the four views are read together on the Application Portfolio page.

How to

Find capabilities served by several applications

  1. Check capability coverage. The map is built from the capability recorded against each application in Business Capability L1 to Business Capability L3. These are application columns with no field on the Application form. Check the UNMAPPED card first.
  2. Open the map. Go to Assess → Business Capability Map. Capabilities render with their supporting applications shown against them.
  3. Choose the level and the colouring. Set Depth: to the capability level you want, and Colour by: to the attribute you want to compare, for example Migration Status.
  4. Look for capabilities with several applications. That is where functional overlap lives. Two applications doing the same job is a rationalisation candidate; four is usually a finding worth escalating.

Important fields

Field Description
Business Capability L1, Business Capability L2, Business Capability L3 The capability an application supports, held as three levels on the application (Applications).

Tips & best practices

This is the view to put in front of the business

Migration decisions get made by people who do not recognise application names. A capability map lets them see the estate in their own terms, which materially improves the quality of the prioritisation conversation and the speed of sign-off.

Common mistakes

Presenting the map before capability coverage is high

An incomplete map can read as a complete one. Check the UNMAPPED card first, and state it when presenting, or the audience will reasonably assume they are seeing the whole estate.