What is the difference between functions and capabilities

Turn on suggestions. Auto-suggest helps you quickly narrow down your search results by suggesting possible matches as you type. Showing results for. Show only Search instead for. Did you mean:. Sign In. Business Capabilities- how Business Functions vs. Business Capabilities- how is your company handling these? Go to solution. New Contributor. Thanks in advance for your thoughts. From a truly functional perspective, business functions should be implementation-independent and only focus on the what, not the how, but in practice there is often a strong overlap with the organization structure of the enterprise: departments are often functionally defined, with e.

Conversely, business functions are often but not exclusively! Like business functions, capabilities describe what an enterprise does, but they can also capture what it is able to do, its abilities.

This capability notion has its roots in military planning. That explains why capabilities describe more than just what an organization does day-to-day: they express the potential of the organization: what are you able to do when the need arises?

High-level capability map of an insurance company. In that sense, it is dispositional — i. For instance, the highest-level capability the US military wants to possess is to fight and win two major wars at the same time. This means that the capability concept differs from a business function, which is typically not used to capture such potential abilities.

So, what can be said is that the Business Process uses the Business Functions in some way instead of both being aggregates of each other. In ArchiMate, how does a process use a function? The answer to that would then be the internal process of the Business Function.

The result is something like in Figure 2. Figure 2. The concepts of a Business Function and a Capability often tend to be blended together and often people confuse Function and Capability. The following diagram Figure 3.

Should the business done that, it can also put new capabilities to support the strategic vision. For example, scheduling a flight is a primary business capability for an airplane company.

Supporting an IT systems which helps to do that is also a capability. These activities either yielding the income themselves core functions or help others functions to do that support functions. Essentially, the business services do not create a tangible product, but perform some work, e.

For a Software Services Company the actual software designing, development, testing and supporting are the services it provides.