WHITEPAPER

From Strategy to
Execution with
Capability-Based
Planning

Marc Lankhorst, Sven van Dijk

 WHITEPAPER From Strategy to Execution with Capability-Based Planning

Contents
The Added Value of Business Architecture 3
Key Challenges 3
How Does Capability-Based Planning Help in Strategy
Execution Management? 4
The Main Steps of Capability-Based Planning 6
Capability-Based Planning in Practice 7
01 MAP - Capability Mapping 9
02 ASSESS - Capability Analysis 11
03 PLAN – Capability Realization 13
From Capabilities to Business Functions to Organization 13
From Capabilities to Resources 14
Agile Capability Development 15
Multi-Level Roadmaps 16
Modeling Roadmaps 16
Modeling Capability Increments & Releases 17
04 CONTROL – Monitoring Progress 19
World-Class Business Architecture with Horizzon 20

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 WHITEPAPER From Strategy to Execution with Capability-Based Planning

Introduction
Failure to execute strategy is the most significant management challenge facing public and private
organizations in the 21st century. In fact, according to economist Michael Porter, more than 80% of
organizations do not successfully execute their business strategies.

Effective business strategy needs a clear execution plan. Not just timescales and budgets, but a clear
focus on which business capabilities need changing and how they impact performance. This is where
business architects add value.

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 WHITEPAPER From Strategy to Execution with Capability-Based Planning

The Added Value of

Business Architecture
Business architecture has several important contributions to make:

01 I t lets you accurately describe what the organization does and how it functions in terms that
create a common understanding between various stakeholders in business and IT.
02 I t supports the alignment of strategic objectives and tactical demands, ensuring optimal
strategy execution.
03 I t guides and informs senior management’s decision-making process and contributes to the
enterprise’s long-term success.

In this whitepaper, we will focus on Capability-Based Planning as the central technique in the business
architect’s toolbox. But first we will try to understand why organizations struggle to implement
their strategy.

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 WHITEPAPER From Strategy to Execution with Capability-Based Planning

Key Challenges
Many organizations struggle to make optimal decisions, because they lack an understanding of the ‘big picture’
of their enterprise:

It is difficult to assess global performance, rather than performance of local

businesses and applications
Organizations often find it difficult to get an enterprise-wide perspective on business performance. An
enterprise is made up of people, processes, information, and technology (both IT and operational), but it is
often unclear how these assets contribute to business goals. This lack of alignment makes it difficult to assess
performance of the organization against the strategic goals of the business at a global level.

Budgets are not unlimited, multiple initiatives compete for those budgets
Prioritizing investments is a complex task. Portfolios are often crowded with initiatives competing for limited
budget. So how do we decide which initiatives will contribute the most to strategic goals? All too often, portfolio
management is ‘decibel-driven’, where those with the loudest voices (rather than the strongest business case)
will get their projects approved.

Outcomes of individual projects do not always support common

business goals
Many change initiatives take place at the same time, often executed using agile approaches, mostly in a fairly
independent way. How do we make sure these initiatives stay aligned in with the goals of the business?

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 WHITEPAPER From Strategy to Execution with Capability-Based Planning

How Does Capability-Based

Planning Help in Strategy
Execution Management?
Enterprise and business architects create coherence between the various moving parts of the enterprise.
However, much of their work centers on how the organization operates, while business leaders focus on what
an organization can do and why this is important.

Capabilities reduce this gap by focusing on business outcomes. They provide a high-level view of the current
and desired abilities of an organization, in relation to strategy and environment. They relate to various elements
(people, processes, systems, etc.) that can be described, designed, and realized using enterprise architecture
approaches. In this way, capabilities provide a useful bridge between strategy and realization. They are also an
important focal point for strategic spending and portfolio management decisions: in which capabilities should
you invest to realize your strategy?

Capabilities are the only concept in the architecture of the business that links strategy, business model and
operating model. Having an overview of all business capabilities on the capability map provides a stable and
non-political perspective of your business. Capabilities define what an organization needs to be able to do,
independent of your structure and technology, to successfully achieve the desired business outcomes.

Potentially, an enterprise can have capabilities that it doesn’t even know it possesses. To quote from the NATO
Architecture Framework v4: “A capability is the ability to achieve a desired effect under specified standards
and conditions. […] In NAF, the term is reserved for the specification of an ability to achieve an outcome. In
that sense, it is dispositional – i.e. resources may possess a Capability even if they have never manifested that
capability.”
Strategy

Goals

Drivers Plans

Propositions Resources

Business Value Operating

Customers Capabilities
Model Stream Model

Experiences Governance

Figure 1. Capabilities as Central Concept

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 WHITEPAPER From Strategy to Execution with Capability-Based Planning

Capability-Based Planning (CBP) is a powerful tool to ensure the alignment of business and IT transformation
to strategy. It provides a shared communication instrument aligning strategy, goals and business priorities to
investments in, for example, organizational change, product development, business process improvement, IT
applications, and technology.

At its heart is a capability map, typically drawn up in business language so all your stakeholders can understand
it, thereby supporting strategic discussions and decisions. A well-understood capability map quickly becomes
the backdrop to many different discussions. Projecting information on top of the map using heatmaps for
instance, makes it easier for everyone to quickly get an overview of the issues and decisions involved in a way
that everyone can understand.

Putting capabilities at the center of planning business transformation helps the organization to focus on
improving “what we do” rather than jumping directly into the how and specific solutions. In that way, Capability
Based Planning helps to make sure we are not just doing things correctly, but also focuses on making sure that
we are doing the right things.

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 WHITEPAPER From Strategy to Execution with Capability-Based Planning

The Main Steps of Capability-

Based Planning
Capability-based planning activities can be structured in a cycle. It shows us where to begin and what the next
steps we need to take to gradually increase the impact on the organization.

Map

Capability
Control Based Assess
Planning

Plan

Figure 2. Capability-Based Planning Process

01 M
 ap. Define and create the Capability Map which we can use to analyze the organization,
assessing the strategic and architectural alignment of the capability framework.
02 A
 ssess. Measure capabilities based on their contribution to our business strategy, identifying
opportunities to improve maturity. You can then visualize this on your capability map, e.g. using
heatmapping techniques.
03 P
 lan. Create scenarios and roadmaps for gap closure. Define and prioritize investments in capability
improvement or development of new capabilities.
04 C
 ontrol. Monitor and steer those capability improvements based on strategic KPIs. Use this
information to feed back into the planning process, continuing the cycle of improvement.

Bizzdesign’s Horizzon platform supports these four activities in an integral and consistent way.

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 WHITEPAPER From Strategy to Execution with Capability-Based Planning

Capability-Based Planning in
Practice
To show you the four steps of capability-based planning in practice, we have detailed a step-by-step example
using architecture models. This scenario is about ArchiSurance, the fictitious insurance company used by The
Open Group in the ArchiMate standard documentation (see also this whitepaper). We’ll be illustrating different
aspects of capability-based planning in ArchiMate®, the industry’s de facto standard language for EA modeling.

ArchiSurance is dealing with serious challenges. Ultra-low interest rates in the markets make it difficult to fulfill
financial obligations for insurers, digital disruption is threatening their business models and profit margins, and
market share is also shrinking.

How does ArchiSurance make enough money to survive in the short term and sustain the business in the long
term? The company runs a strategic analysis of the main ways in which it can improve returns. Their SWOT
analysis, depicted below, leads to the identification of two different strategic options.

Figure 3. ArchiSurance SWOT Analysis

First, they aim to maximize operational excellence to mitigate the perceived inefficiency in their internal
operations. Second, ArchiSurance sees the rapid pace of technology innovation as both a challenge and an
opportunity. They identify a strategic option based on ‘digital customer intimacy’, which employs a combination
of big data and the Internet of Things (IoT). This is depicted in Figure 4. According to this strategy, they want
to use insights into customer behavior to improve customer interaction and satisfaction, and to develop
customized insurance premiums.

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Figure 4: Strategic Analysis

In its Digital Customer Intimacy strategy, ArchiSurance takes a two-pronged approach. First, it wants to engage
with its customers more intimately through various social media channels. Second, it aims to use real-time
external data, e.g. from fitness trackers, to customize its insurance products.

Another useful artifact to express ArchiSurance’s strategy and business model is a Business Model Canvas, as
shown in Figure 5. Later, we will see how this relates to capabilities.

Figure 5. ArchiSurance Business Model Canvas

Following this strategic analysis, we can now start creating a capability map of the organization to successfully
transform the company.

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01
MAP - Capability Mapping
With the relationship between business strategy and capabilities mapped at the top level, how do you create
a good overview of your capabilities? Why is identifying capabilities important for your organization? How to
define them? How do you classify them? And how can they be included in your capability map?

Capabilities define what your organization must be able to do to successfully achieve its strategic goals. They
are the key building blocks of your business, unique and existing independently of each other, tending to be
stable over time.

These general guidelines will help you define your business capabilities:

   apabilities define what your business does or can do, not how it does it or who is doing it. They are
C
different from business processes, functions, services, organization units, or IT systems, although these
may all contribute to a capability. The same capability may be implemented in different ways, e.g.
manually, IT-supported, or fully automated.
  Capabilities are owned by your business and named and defined in business terms by subject matter
experts (not the IT department). Their definition should be readily understandable by all stakeholders.
  They are typically named using nouns (e.g. ‘Product innovation’) unlike business processes or value
streams, which are named with verbs (e.g. ‘Purchase materials’).
  Capabilities are unique and stable. They are defined only once for the whole enterprise and they don’t
change very frequently, unless, for example, your organization undertakes a new line of business or
divests some of its current operations.
  Together, these capabilities should be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive: there should be no
overlaps or gaps between them.
  Capabilities may be composite, consisting of sub-capabilities. A capability may also use other
capabilities.
  Capabilities can be organized in a capability map, which provides an overview of your entire enterprise.
  A capability’s maturity can be assessed across different dimensions, such as people, process, technology,
assets, or information. These are the basis for capability-based planning.

Capabilities are focused on your ability to achieve certain results rather than on how those results are achieved.
Where a process or value stream defines the ‘business in motion’, sequencing activities creates a dynamic
perspective on business behavior. Capabilities define the potential behavior of an enterprise, the latent abilities
of your ‘business at rest’. This helps you get away from the specifics of how (e.g. in which order) certain activities
are performed and focus on what those activities actually are.

A capability not only describes what the business already does, like a business function, but also its potential.
This is very useful from a strategic perspective because it provides management with insights into future
options. Describing this potential is extremely valuable when you want to explore your existing abilities to deliver
new business models or other innovations that deviate from the current functioning of the enterprise. This is
what makes capabilities such a strategically relevant concept.

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A capability map illustrates the capabilities of your enterprise in some state, e.g. current capabilities and their
maturity level, or required capabilities to achieve a future state. Each capability can be made more specific
by decomposition. From a top-down perspective, capabilities are derived from the strategic direction of
the organization. Figure 6 shows such a capability map of ArchiSurance, using the Capability concept in the
ArchiMate modeling language.

Figure 6: Capability Map of ArchiSurance

These capabilities can also be linked to, for example, a higher-level description in the Business Model Canvas like
the one in Figure 5, where your capabilities may figure as key activities. Horizzon fully supports this integrated
approach.
From a bottom-up perspective, components and assets (e.g. applications, data, physical assets, knowledge,
and skills) can be linked to the capabilities they support. This creates an indirect link between components and
assets, and strategic direction. You can use capabilities as a starting point for the definition of asset portfolios.

Capabilities can be classified in various ways, for example in:

  
Strategic vs. operational vs. supporting, as used in ArchiSurance’s capability map in
  Core vs. non-core
  Customer-facing vs. internal
  Innovating vs. differentiating vs. commodity

Such a classification scheme can highlight interesting facts about investment and sourcing decisions:
  
Differentiating: customer-facing capabilities which are core and are seldom outsourced.
  Strategic: capabilities that are important for the long-term future of your enterprise and are often
assigned a separate budget to avoid the ‘innovation squeeze’, preventing core, operational capabilities
eating the entire budget at the cost of innovating capabilities.
  Non-core: commodity or supporting capabilities that are non-core are good candidates for outsourcing
to expert partners.

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02
ASSESS - Capability Analysis
Previously we have briefly outlined the two strategic goals that our example company ArchiSurance is aiming
for: improving operational excellence and increasing digital customer intimacy. Assessing the current situation
with respect to these two goals is the first step in analyzing gaps between the current and desired situation and
prioritizing the changes needed to fill these gaps.

As we saw above, the company perceives that their operations are inefficient in places. To analyze this further, they
have benchmarked the efficiency of their capabilities against the industry average. The result of this analysis is
used to create a capability heatmap: average capabilities are shown in bright yellow, above-average capabilities in
green and below-average capabilities in orange (Figure 7).

Figure 7: Capability Heat Map

The capabilities shown in orange are where ArchiSurance expects to find room for improvement in the context
of the operational excellence strategy. As you can see, the Customer Management capability and its sub-
capabilities seem to be a hotspot in this diagram.

Figure 8 shows how you can use spider charts to visualize your capability analysis in more detail. The chart shows
the current and desired performance of a capability along different axes. This allows us to see the incremental
development of a capability. For Customer Management, we have defined six dimensions. The baseline analysis
for this capability results in values for the different dimensions, shown in green. The desired maturity, broken
down into values for the individual dimensions, is shown in orange.

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Figure 8: Capability Analysis Figure 9. Metric Definition

In the underlying ArchiMate model, we specify Metrics for each of the different dimensions. This concept is
defined as a specialization of Driver, using the language customization mechanism of the ArchiMate standard.
Metrics can be aggregated, as shown in Figure 9: the Information dimension of the capability analysis consists
of a weighted average of completeness, consistency and availability. Further analysis leads ArchiSurance to
the conclusion that in particular the availability of customer information across the enterprise is too low, which
in turn leads to inconsistencies and incompleteness in the data. This analysis forms the basis of defining and
prioritizing initiatives to close these capability gaps.

In a more general sense, capabilities are a good starting point for capital allocation aligned with your organi-
zation’s strategy. Capability analyses may help you draw up investment plans, allocating more budget to those
capabilities that need a substantial improvement in one or more dimensions. This improved visibility offers a
coherent way to address and achieve specific outcomes. The portfolio management functionality of Horizzon is
ideally suited to support this kind of decision making.

Next to improving existing capabilities as described above, the second prong of ArchiSurance’s strategy, Digital
Customer Intimacy, requires new capabilities as well. Figure 10 below shows the main new capabilities needed
to realize the strategy detailed in Figure 4, how they relate to current capabilities, and how they contribute to
ArchiSurance’s desired business outcomes.

Figure 10: Digital Customer Intimacy Strategy

ArchiSurance has identified two high priority gaps:

- Improving the Customer Management capability by sharing customer data across the entire compan
- Adding new capabilities to support the Digital Customer Intimacy strategy, within the existing capabilities of
Customer Management and Policy and Claim Management

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03
PLAN – Capability Realization
The next step in ArchiSurance’s strategy implementation is planning the realization of these desired capabilities
and capability improvements. The company wants to establish several new capabilities to support its Digital
Customer Intimacy strategy, such as Digital Customer Management, Data-Driven Insurance, Data Acquisition,
and Data Analysis. Moreover, it wants to improve capabilities that scored below par according to their analysis
as summarized in the heatmap of Figure 7 and the spider chart of Figure 9.

From Capabilities to Business Functions to Organization

Where capabilities represent the current or desired abilities of an organization, business functions describe the
work actually done by your organization. They are often explicitly managed and more closely aligned to the
organization’s structure by assigning the responsibility for certain business functions to specific departments
for instance. Of course, if you do the work you will need the ability to do so. Therefore, there can be an overlap
between the two notions.

Unfortunately, the way in which capabilities are often used in business architecture today has lost some of
the benefits of the original notion because they are focused only on day-to-day operations. They no longer
represent the potential of the organization, i.e., the abilities it has but doesn’t directly employ. This has
increased confusion among architects who used to create business function maps but are now confronted with
identical-looking capability maps.

That is obviously not ideal. Instead, you should map capabilities as intended: to describe what the enterprise
does or is able to do. That is what gives your map strategic relevance. Business functions performed by the
organization can then contribute to the realization of these capabilities.

When you draw a map of the current capabilities of the organization, your business functions will often figure
prominently – what you do today is obviously something you are also capable of doing. You will also find that
multiple business functions may (together with other elements) contribute to the realization of a capability.

Figure 11 shows some of these relationships between several primary capabilities of ArchiSurance, its current
business functions, and the departments responsible for these business functions. The new sub-capabili-
ties from the previous figure are part of the two green capabilities in this figure. These may be realized by
augmenting the existing business functions (and the processes within them), but they might also need new
functions and resources.

For instance, the Data-Driven insurance capability and its sub-capabilities may need an entirely new part of
the organization to be set up, with advanced business intelligence expertise and tool support that ArchiSurance
currently doesn’t have. The Actuarial, Claims and Underwriting business functions may be changed substantially
to take advantage of the new data on customer behavior that will become available.

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Figure 11: Capability Realization

From Capabilities to Resources

The new capabilities identified above need the right resources – people, knowledge, skills, smart devices for
data acquisition, and the customer data itself. These resources are realized by the enterprise architecture core.
Figure 12 shows a small part of what this may result in. Note that this does not depict all elements needed to
realize these resources, only a representative sample. In practice, you will often create separate views to show
how individual capabilities and resources are realized.

Figure 12: Resources Assigned to Capabilities

By putting it all together, you get a line of sight from your different assets upwards to the capabilities they
support and to the strategies, goals and outcomes that sit above them. Horizzon allows you to go further still
- you can link detailed models of your processes in BPMN or your data in UML, to your ArchiMate architecture
model for instance.

You can gain insights into the effects of strategic decisions, and vice versa, uncovering new options and
innovations provided by the resources you already employ. Planning, executing, and controlling change across
your enterprise has never been easier!

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Agile Capability Development

Of course, such a transformation is a major effort and the requisite capabilities need to be established
iteratively, to enable a short learning cycle and try out new ideas and products in a ‘fail fast’ mode.
ArchiSurance has therefore chosen to use a light, agile implementation process, without losing sight of its
longer-term goals. Individual capability increments are delivered by rapidly going through a release cycle
multiple times. Capabilities will be developed and improved in close coordination by parallel, cross-functional
teams incorporating marketers, product developers, business and IT architects, software developers, financial
experts and others, as needed. These teams are on a synchronized cadence, delivering an increment of ‘their’
capability every four weeks.

This cadence already determines a high-level migration plan, with eight-weekly plateaus. The detailed
content and architecture of each plateau for a capability increment are determined in the first two weeks of its
development, in conjunction with architecting and planning the increments of other capabilities, to make sure
the pieces of the puzzle will fit together. This way, these increments can be delivered at the same time in an
integrated manner. After this initial two-week architecture and planning stage, the capability increment itself
is realized, tested and deployed in three two-week iterations. Each increment is related to concrete business
outcomes that are to be achieved.

Figure 13 shows a high-level roadmap where the sub-capabilities of the Customer Management capability are
gradually improved by different change initiatives. In the underlying ArchiMate model, these change initiatives
are modeled as work packages. For example, we first see an initiative Consistent Master Data Model and next
one for Improved Information Sharing. Each initiative contributes to improvements in the capability metrics we
defined and assessed before (see Figure 9 and Figure 10).

Figure 13: Capability-Based Planning Timeline

These change initiatives will be detailed out in smaller pieces of work and planned in sprints by the agile teams
involved. The capability increments themselves require several other improvements to various aspects of the
architecture, leading to a multi-level roadmap of changes.

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Multi-Level Roadmaps
Roadmaps can be defined in various ways and at multiple levels. In the context of software development using
the Scaled Agile Framework, you will often see multiple levels and time scales, such as:

   oadmap: iterations of multiple months or even years.

R
  Release: iterations of a few months.
  Sprint: iterations of a few weeks.

The evolution of your capabilities may be expressed in features and stories and put on the backlog of a sprint.
They will then be developed by the agile teams. Several sprints from multiple agile teams result in a release that
provides a capability increment; a series of releases may together result in a specific business outcome.

When creating a multi-level roadmap, you will define:

   hort-term sprints, describing specific user stories to be implemented and concrete changes to processes
S
and systems.
  Medium-term releases, describing high-level features for each release. The nearest release will include
more coarse-grained detail.
  Long-term roadmap stages that include more abstract features, such as identifying capability
improvements or generalized long-term goals and desired outcomes.

Modeling Roadmaps
The most prominent feature of the ArchiMate language for roadmapping is the Plateau concept. In the
standard, this is defined as: “a relatively stable state of the architecture that exists during a limited period of
time”. The intention of this concept is to model fairly major changes to your architecture, hence ‘relatively
stable’; small-scale changes are too frequent to lend themselves easily to being collected in plateaus.

Architecture scope may be limited to a specific part of the architecture, say a business domain or a specific
system, or of course a certain capability. Multiple sub-plateaus can be aggregated in one larger one, to model
the overall roadmap consisting of the evolution of different business domains or roadmaps at different levels of
detail, as mentioned previously.

You can also use plateaus to express alternative paths towards the future, as shown in the example in Figure
14. The scenario starts after the merger of two organizations: In Transition A, a common CRM system is
implemented first, whereas in Transition B the back-office systems are replaced first. Transition C is then the
state in which both CRM and back-office systems have been consolidated. 

Figure 14: Roadmap with Plateaus

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Next to Plateaus, Work Packages are used to model the work to be done at the different levels involved, from
individual sprints to entire roadmaps. The resulting evolution of the architecture is captured in Plateaus, which
aggregate the architecture elements valid during a certain time span. Figure 15 shows some of this. On the left,
we see the development of concrete processes, systems and data organized in sprints modeled with ArchiMate’s
Plateau and Work Package concepts. Multiple teams may be at work during the same sprint period, hence the
replication of the Work Packages.

Modeling Capability Increments & Releases

We organize capability increments in releases that are themselves the result of a series of sprints (Figure
16). This view shows the release planning and for Release 1 also the (simplified) sprint planning. This way, you
can analyze what will happen to the availability of your solution if an agile team decides to move a certain
feature to a later sprint, for instance. In the underlying model (but not shown in the figure), all the elements
created or changed in the two sprints contribute to the first capability increment, which in turn is related to the
Consistent Master Data Model initiative at the bottom of Figure 14. Of course, this is a highly simplified figure for
explanatory purposes; the real roadmap is much more extensive.

Figure 15: High-Level and Detailed Roadmap Stages

The further you look ahead, the less concrete your roadmap will be. Hence the concepts used for the near
future are typically the concrete and detailed business, application, and technology layer elements. For the
medium-term future, you might use the more abstract capabilities and resources, and the longer term you
would perhaps express using goals and outcomes only.

The graphical notation for plateaus is mainly useful to map such an evolution, rather than to depict the
architecture itself, since many elements in your architecture will be part of several plateaus. For example,
anything in the baseline that survives through the transitions above is part of all plateaus on the roadmap. 
For that reason, we often use plateaus in an architecture model but not necessarily in a view in the way shown
in Figure 15.

Often, we enter the aggregation relationships between plateaus and their content in a cross-reference table
and use this in views and analyses. Figure 16 shows an example of such an analysis, highlighting elements based
on the plateaus they are part of, based on the same scenario shown above. 

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Figure 16: Highlighting Plateaus in the Architecture

Such a heatmap quickly shows the impact of changes to your architecture.

Next to the coarse-grained roadmap evolution outlined above, you may also want to model that some element
in the architecture is improved. A common example of this is using ‘capability increments’ to express that the
maturity of some capability grows over time.

A good way to do this is to model each increment as a specialization of a higher-level generic element, in this
case that specific capability, and aggregate these specializations in appropriate plateaus. This way you can see
both the overall structure of the architecture, e.g. which elements are needed to realize this capability, and show
consecutive improvements too. The same pattern works for modeling software releases.

For instance, as shown in Figure 17, you may model the generic element ‘General CRM System’ with specializa-
tions like ‘General CRM System 3.2’, ‘General CRM System 3.3’ and ‘General CRM System 4.0’. Each of these can
in turn be related to a plateau that starts on the release or deployment date of that version and ends when it is
replaced by the next.

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Figure 17: Roadmap with releases and version

Much more can be said about roadmapping, lifecycles and the evolution of your architecture over time, and they
ways in which Horizzon’s features support this, but we will save that for another whitepaper.

Moreover, what we describe here is the planning of how capability improvements can be achieved. The actual
implementation of the necessary changes is of course key. That takes us to the final step in our approach.

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04
CONTROL – Monitoring Progress
Planned capability improvements aim to uplift capabilities in the various analysis dimensions we defined. (N.B.:
Delivering completely new capabilities can be treated as an improvement from a baseline that starts at 0: you
have nothing there yet). These dimensions are in turn related to the business drivers we outlined at the start (e.g.
Figure 4).

As we mentioned, one key area for improvement in the Customer Management capability is the Information
dimension. This is therefore an important KPI to track, so we can monitor whether the implementation of
the change initiatives on our roadmap leads to the expected improvements in information completeness,
availability and consistency.

Each change initiative is linked to one or more capability gaps that it helps to close, and each gap closure
provides an improvement in the relevant KPIs of the capability. Figure 19 shows at the top how and when we
expect improvements in the Information dimension of the Customer Management capability, and how much
each change initiative contributes to that. In the middle, we see the four gaps that need to be closed and what
their relative importance is; in this case, all are equally weighted at 25%. At the bottom, we see a comparison of
the target and expected KPI improvements. There appears to be a difference there: the expected improvement
from the current change initiatives is slightly below target in 2021, but we also expect to finish above target in
2022, so there is no immediate reason for concern.

Figure 19. Monitoring KPIs for Capability Gap Closure

Of course, the implementation of these change initiatives is continuously monitored, so we can see if they are
delivered on time and indeed provided the envisaged capability improvements, closing the gaps as expected. If
not, we may need to replan our roadmap, define additional improvements and changes, or if all else fails, lower
our targets if they cannot be achieved given time, budget or other constraints.

This then closes the loop. New and improved capabilities are delivered that feed back into the initial ‘Map’ step
of the Capability-Based Planning process, providing the baseline for the next iteration.

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World-Class Business Architecture

with Horizzon
Horizzon allows stakeholders across your business to collaborate effectively on creating and managing a solid
business architecture.

   he platform’s intuitive modeling environment, Enterprise Studio, speeds up work and provides those
T
crucial quick wins to maintain momentum in your transformation projects.
  Extensive standards and frameworks support ensures best practice adherence.
  The Horizzon platform offers native support for multiple disciplines. This makes it very easy to connect
business architecture to related subdomain architectures or other domains of change.
  Planning is informed by the whole organizational picture so decisions are taken to benefit all areas of your
business.

Best Practice Frameworks

Easily create and manage your Business Architecture with access to best practice frameworks and techniques,
e.g. ArchiMate, the Business Model Canvas, BIZBOK® and others.

Transparency & Insight

Empower business architects and analysts to achieve more with a unified and intuitive modeling environment
that supports explorative use of models and proactive risk detection.

Informed Decision Making

Support fact-based decision making by consolidating information from various domains (enterprise
architecture, portfolio management etc.) and sources.

Powerful Analyses
Navigate across models and create cross-domain analyses to highlight the impact of change on business
capabilities, application portfolio etc.

Boost Business-IT Collaboration

Ensure vital communication and collaboration between Business and IT stakeholders by keeping everyone
informed thanks to Horizzon’s powerful reporting and publishing capabilities.

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About Bizzdesign
Founded in 2000, Bizzdesign is the trusted global SaaS Enterprise Architecture platform and recognized as
a leader by major analyst firms. We help the world’s leading public and private organizations guarantee the
success of investment prioritization, transformation initiatives, and risk management. Bizzdesign helps architects
and executives to see a full multi-dimensional picture, find and design the right path and execute with confidence
to their targeted future. Success should not be a matter of hope. It should be by design. For more information,
visit www.bizzdesign.com or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

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