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75 Examples of a Business Capability

John Spacey, updated on July 12, 2024

A business capability is a function that is delivered by an organization. These describe what an organization does for the purposes of business planning, reporting and operations. Business capabilities are implemented with processes, practices and competencies. Capabilities may be documented at various levels of detail such as organizational, department or team capabilities. The following are illustrative examples of business capabilities.

Accounting	Accounts Payable
Accounts Receivable & Collections	Advertising
Asset Management	Branding
Budgeting & Forecasting	Business Analysis
Business Continuity Planning	Capacity Planning
Change Management	Compensation & Benefits
Competitive Analysis	Cost Management
Crisis Management	Customer Advocacy
Customer Experience	Customer Onboarding
Customer Relationship Management	Customer Service
Cybersecurity	Data Analytics & Reporting
Data Center Operations	Demand Forecasting
DevOps	Digital Marketing
Distribution	Ecommerce
Employee Onboarding	Employee Relations
Employee Training & Development	Facility Management
Financial Management	Infrastructure Management
Internal Controls & Audit	Inventory Management
IT Governance	IT Operations
Knowledge Management	Lead Generation
Legal & Compliance	Maintenance & Repair
Manufacturing	Market Research
Marketing	Order Fulfillment
Payroll	Performance Management
Pricing	Process Automation
Procurement	Product Design
Product Development	Product Management
Product Marketing	Project Management
Public Relations	Quality Assurance
Quality Control	Recruiting
Regulatory Compliance	Research & Development
Retail	Risk Management
Sales	Service Delivery
Service Marketing	Software Development
Strategic Planning	Supply Chain Management
Systems Architecture & Design	Tax Management
Vendor Management	Warehousing
Workplace Health & Safety

What Qualifies as a Business Capability?

A business capability is what a business does without consideration for how it does it. As such, business processes and standard operating procedures are specifically not business capabilities. Business capabilities can include core business, operations and technology capabilities.

Business Processes vs Business Capabilities

A business process implements a set of business capabilities. You can define mappings between processes and capabilities.

Levels

Business capabilities are commonly broken down into a three level hierarchy. For example, cybersecurity is a top level business capability that includes second level capabilities such as patch management. It is possible to break these second level capabilities down further into third level capabilities.

How are Business Capabilities Used?

Business capabilities are used to document, plan and monitor your core business and operations. They are a common starting point for business planning, operations planning, enterprise architecture, business architecture and related pursuits such as business process re-engineering.

Who Uses Business Capabilities?

Business capabilities can be used by anyone in your organization. For example, they are a useful construct for requirements gathering from stakeholders. It is also common to report on the status of business capabilities to managers and executives, often as a dashboard. This is useful for areas like compliance where different compliance capabilities can be tracked by business unit, process, product and so forth.

Mappings

Business capabilities can be mapped to processes, systems, products, business units, requirements and other business entities. This creates many possibilities for planning and operations. For example, you could create an operational dashboard with these mappings that shows which business capabilities are impacted by a system outage.

Core Competencies vs Business Capabilities

Core competencies are a similar concept to business capabilities that concern the capabilities of people and teams. Business capabilities are a higher level and more generic concept. You can map business capabilities to core competencies. For example, a business capability such as cybersecurity which is an organizational function can be mapped to core competencies such as security operations which is something that is done by a team or department. In practice, the two terms are common confused and used interchangeably.

Summary

A business capability is a function delivered by an organization. These are a basic concept that are documented as part of an organization's architecture and design. Business capabilities can also be used to create things such as dashboards and operational monitoring.