Business Capabilities and Value Stream
Capability and Value Stream Structure
The Frictionless Capability Model organizes business activities into a structured hierarchy that connects strategy, operations, and technology.
The model contains several layers that describe how organizations operate.
At the highest level are business capabilities.
Capabilities describe what a business must be able to do in order to operate and deliver value.
Examples include:
• marketing management
• customer relationship management
• product delivery
• finance and accounting
• human resources
• information technology services
Capabilities are intentionally stable and change slowly over time.
Beneath capabilities are value streams.
Value streams describe how organizations deliver value through a sequence of activities.
Examples of value streams include:
• acquiring customers
• delivering products
• providing customer support
• managing financial operations
Value streams help organizations understand how capabilities work together to deliver outcomes.
At deeper levels of the architecture model, capabilities and value streams connect to:
• business processes
• applications and systems
• infrastructure platforms
• information and data objects
This layered approach makes it possible to analyze how technology supports business operations and where opportunities exist to simplify systems or improve automation.
The Frictionless Capability Model uses this structure to map applications to the business capabilities they support during the Technology Physical diagnostic.
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