The Enterprise Architecture Matters Blog Chapter III: Design the Enterprise with Business Capabilities

This is the third part of a collection of blogs on Enterprise Architecture (EA) I posted since the beginning of 2007. Enterprise Architecture (EA) has made little progress since then though. Yet, new paradigms emerge as we speak to challenge the status quo. Business Capabilities, Design Thinking, Business Design, Design Sprint, the Digital Twin of the Organisation, Bimodal and Two Speed IT, DevOps, Agile… are all adding their bits to the enterprise picture. Yet, they have not solved the key EA issue, the modelling of the Enterprise.
The book, after recapping the EA state, methods and roadblocks, management and governance, the architects' mission and skills… elaborates on the Enterprise Modelling.
Since the ultimate goal of EA is to Design the Enterprise, the book proposes an enterprise design method with Off-the Shelf Business Capabilities. To cover the entire enterprise, capabilities are first delineated on a generic business architecture, GODS, essentially an extension to the Value Chain. Each capability could be built today from a number of applications but in time suppliers should join their offers to provide the seamless integration of the capabilities in the architecture. The Enterprise Architect or the Entrepreneur, the designer of a Startup, just have to customise the capabilities for their enterprise and determine the applications which are realising or are going to realise the capabilities.