Photo by Sebastiaan ter Burg by CC BY

Good news: Cabusi gets more and more traction. But as more people are using cabusi nowadays, we are also confronted with lots of questions around Business Capability Best Practices. Questions like:

What is a Business Capability?

How do you define it?

How is a Business Capability different from a Business Process?

Do you have any Best Practises on how to come up with a Business Capability Model?

As we love to be in contact with you and really appreciate your questions and feedback, the intention of this post was to come up with a definition. A definition I have been using in the many workshops I have been doing around Business Capability Management. Explaining the basics of what a Business Capability is, what it is not etc.

Don't think I am lazy but after reading this blog post:

http://www.cutter.com/content-and-analysis/resource-centers/enterprise-architecture/sample-our-research/ear1102.html

from the Cutter Consortium I was questioning to accept the challenge. There are many discussions around how to define a Business Capability in well known EA blogs and groups. Many people have slightly different views but from my personal opinion the above mentioned post explains it very well.

To me this reads as a guideline based on lots of experience and something I highly recommend to read and use.

If you have other sources or Best Practices, please let us know in the comments.

The other day I had a discussion with somebody who said cabusi is a little bit like LinkedIn and asked me: "What's your competitive advantage?". I first was a little bit confused but there definitely are some similarities and it's a fair question.

The intention of cabusi is to bring a community of capability management experts together, to share knowledge and to learn from each other. A bit like what's already very successfully happening in LinkedIn groups. In addition to that, cabusi can be used to be recognised as an expert in a specific industry or in creating business capability models in general. Maybe there will be even people who will be offered a new job because of the great work they share on cabusi.

But in general I don't see a competitive advantage to LinkedIn as we really don't want to be seen as a competitor. The focus is the creation and sharing of business capability models. Not more but also not less :-)

But sharing and discussing about capability models is already happening in LinkedIn Groups as well. Let's have a look at an excerpt of this thread https://www.linkedin.com/groups/If-you-were-create-Business-36781.S.96882229?view=&item=96882229&type=member&gid=36781&trk=eml-group_discussion_new_comment-discussion-title-link&midToken=AQE6vyliQu2Ebg&fromEmail=fromEmail&ut=06IxHPJrd-5mo1

Our first step was to identify our high-level capabilities. This resulted in seven capabilities:  1. Client relationship management  2. Sales & marketing management  3. Product/service planning & development management  4. Finance & Administration management  5. HR management  6. Knowledgebase management  7. Engagement management  3. Product/service planning & development management  Product and service offerings  3.1 Advice Consulting  3.2 Training  3.3 Methods & Tools  3.4 Advice Realization  3.5 Publications  3.6 Combination packages of 1 thru 5 

Does it work? I would say yes. There are lots f threads like this in LinkedIn groups as well as in other forums of other websites. Is it the best way to do it? In my opinion it is not. We all are more attracted to nice visualisations than to text. Wouldn't it be easier to discuss based on an automatically created map like this one?

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to say that cabusi is a better collaboration platform than LinkedIn. Absolutely not. LinkedIn has way more users, features and the ability to discuss about just everything not only Capability Models. No doubt!

From my point of view a combination of both tools is the best way of getting the best result - a capability model which suits your needs - with the support of the community. What are the possibilities:

Why not starting and keeping the overall conversation in LinkedIn Groups and whenever it gets more detailed, just link to a cabusi model with a simple url like this one http://www.cabusi.com/model/aEjMHFr5Sd6i54SSD which points you to the same model as you see above.

As we like LinkedIn so much, we even support starting a discussion in LinkedIn based on a capability model in cabusi.

Many of you looking at our Business Capability platform cabusi start asking what does cabusi stand for? Let me try to explain...

The good news is cabusi not just a fantasy name but we really put some thinking into that before we launched the platform. It was a fun and creative process where we started to list all words which have something to do with what cabusi is today and what we want it to be in the future. The list looks somehow like that (just a short abstract).

capability

collaboration

crowd sourcing

templates

business

Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architects

Business Architecture

model

...

Overall we listed exactly 258 words :-) First of all that was a great exercise not only because we were getting closer in finding a name but it also helped us in positioning our idea in the market. It helped us to find out what cabusi should be and what it shouldn't be. To be honest - up until today we are still not 100% clear on which direction cabusi will take, but that's fine. It is and will be a platform for the community. Therefore cabusi will be also driven by the requirements and feedback we get from the community.

But what the heck do you do with 258 words? We started checking still available domain names and twitter handles. But as you can imagine this can be a very frustrating exercise as almost all of the names we listed are already in use. So we had to get creative. The goal was that the name should have something to do with what cabusi stands for and we started combining words. Things like:

EntBiz

BizCap

DomModel

and so forth started to develop. When we looked at the words Capability and Business we immediately liked what we saw.

That's how cabusi was born.

Just to let you know that sign up is open to everybody now. We are looking forward to having you on board.

As you may have noticed we're in closed beta now. That means that the Sign Up button is not working but we are inviting people on a regular and selected basis. If you would like to be one of the closed beta testers, please write an email to [email protected].