Page 25 - Visual Paradigm Enterprise Architecture Phase A

Strategic Planning

In strategic planning it is valuable to understand the capabilities within the enterprise, especially the business and IT
capabilities, because you want to know if any capabilities needs to strengthen or add to implement the strategic and
operational changes envisages.

Here are some examples of business and IT capabilities.

• For business you may have business management as a capability, which can be split further into capabilities like the
management of strategic, fiscal and accounting, risk and compliance, and performance.

• From this example you can also see the difference between business functions and capabilities, which are often
confused because something an organization deliver, must be something it’s capable to do.

But as you can see, when considering capabilities we focus on the expertise and capacity, instead of describing pieces
of works done by an organization.

Let’s also take a look at some of the IT capabilities.

We have applications and management, which involves application design and architecture, development, testing
and quality assurance and change management.

Again, capabilities are not any services or functions or development unit but the expertise it has in achieving certain
strategic needs.

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