Business Capability Framework

Overview

The TM Forum Business Architecture offers Communications Service Providers (CSPs) the means to build and manage a capability map for their organization. The capability map facilitates discussion and unity between business and technical teams. It also accelerates the development of each business’s own capability map representing the capabilities of the organization. This is used to drive strategic decisions such as where to partner to realize the future view of the business. It also helps maintain clarity and congruence across the organization during large scale transformation projects, thereby helping to reduce risk. When attempting to diversify the business it is very important to have a capability view of the organization to drive both the strategy and operational changes.

Improving investment and refining goals

The capability map can be used to benchmark against industry or competitors and to identify perceived needs, allowing for more effective definition and prioritisation of investments and partnering decisions to achieve digital transformation, and successful execution of future strategy.

To achieve a set of business goals, an organization establishes, evolves, and retires business capabilities that enable the creation and transfer of value between its stakeholders through value streams. This turnover of capabilities entails defining and executing a capability strategy, expressed in terms of current, transition, and target architectures. The gaps between these architecture states are addressed by defining and implementing roadmaps, which can differ in nature (e.g. business-driven or tech-driven) and which must be aligned and congruent.

Organizations can then define capability roadmaps to address those gaps systematically, expressing them objectively in terms of the capability's structure and its related concepts and models (e.g. value streams, stakeholders, resources, processes, etc.).

TM Forum aims to provide the baseline assets to accelerate the creation and management of capability roadmaps, which in turn increase the potential for successful digital transformation and execution of strategy across the organization.