ArchiMate Metamodel

In the field of business, strategic thinking and planning delivers strategies and high-level goals that are often not directly implementable in the architecture of an organization. These long-term or generic plans need to be specified and made actionable in a way that both business leaders and Enterprise Architects can relate to and at a relatively high abstraction level.

Capabilities help to reduce this gap by focusing on business outcomes. On the one hand, they provide a high-level view of the current and desired abilities of an organization, in relation to its strategy and its environment. On the other hand, they are realized by various elements (people, processes, systems, and so on) that can be described, designed, and implemented using Enterprise Architecture approaches. Capabilities may also have influence relationships; for example, to denote that one capability contributes to another.

Capabilities are expressed in general and high-level terms and are typically realized by a combination of organization, people, processes, information, and technology. For example, marketing, customer contact, or outbound telemarketing [4].

Capabilities are typically aimed at achieving some goal or delivering value by realizing an outcome. Capabilities are themselves realized by core elements. To denote that a set of core elements together realizes a capability, grouping can be used.

Capabilities are often used for capability-based planning, to describe their evolution over time.

To model such so-called capability increments, the specialization relationship can be used to denote that a certain capability increment is a specific version of that capability. Aggregating those increments and the core elements that realize them in plateaus (see Section 13.2.4) can be used to model the evolution of the capabilities.