Deriving a Process for Interorganizational Business Capability Modeling

through Case Study Analysis

Fatih Yılmaz

1,2

, Julian Feldmeier

and Florian Matthes

Department of Informatics, Technical University of Munich, Boltzmannstr. 3, Garching, Germany

Institut f

ur Rundfunktechnik GmbH, Floriansm

uhlstr. 60, Munich, Germany

Keywords:

Enterprise Architecture, Business Capabilities, Interorganizational, Collaborative, Multiple Case Study.

Abstract:

To stay competitive in a globalized, constantly changing market environment with ongoing technological ad-

vancements, companies are not only focusing on their organization’s key capabilities but also collaborate more

closely with partners, suppliers, customers, and also competitors. By analyzing an enterprise’s business capa-

bilities, business leaders get an abstracted, holistic view of the organization and the alignment of its business

model and visions with the IT. Further, business capabilities and visualizations can help to improve the commu-

nication with business partners. Therefore, different companies operating in the same industry collaboratively

identify and model common business capabilities to deﬁne a shared ontology. Based on the knowledge gained

through literature review carried out on the topic of business capability modeling, we conducted a multiple

case study in this ﬁeld. As a result, we derived a reference process for interorganizational business capability

modeling which we evaluated by conducting semi-structured interviews with members of different interorga-

nizational initiatives. The outcome of our research is an iterative process of modeling business capabilities in

interorganizational collaborations.

1 INTRODUCTION

For decades, companies work together due to many

beneﬁts for the collaborating organizations (Diirr and

Cappelli, 2018). This becomes especially impor-

tant as enterprises and their IT landscapes become

more and more interconnected (Drews and Schirmer,

2014). To manage the rising complexity of busi-

ness processes and IT components communicating

across the enterprise’s boundaries, the concept of

interorganizational Enterprise Architecture Manage-

ment (EAM) has gained interest from the industry and

science (Yilmaz et al., 2020).

According to Moore, companies are shifting to

collaborate not only with their suppliers and cus-

tomers but also with their competitors working in the

same industry (Moore, 1996). Since these companies

often have similar capabilities, it appears natural to

collaborate in modeling these capabilities. The de-

sign and model of business capabilities supports the

alignment of business and IT as it allows an abstracted

and holistic view of an organization’s abilities and its

components (Ulrich and Rosen, 2011). The way a

single company can identify, and design its capabili-

ties was subject to an increasing amount of research

(Brits et al., 2007). But despite the shift to cooperat-

ing business ecosystems and interorganizational col-

laborations, the process of developing and modeling

business capabilities involving multiple companies is

barely studied and might vary widely from the one in

a single company. With this background, we identi-

ﬁed the following research questions (RQ):

RQ 1: How do companies from the same industry

proceed in modeling common business capabilities?

RQ 2: How does the interorganizational business

capability modeling process differ from the modeling

process of a single organization?

To answer the ﬁrst research question, a literature

review according to Webster and Watson was con-

ducted (Webster and Watson, 2002). The relevant lit-

erature provided a basis for the analysis of documents

and protocols and conducting semi-structured inter-

views following the guidelines for multiple case study

(Runeson and H

ost, 2009; Yin, 2017). We evaluated

the developed draft process by conducting interviews

with experts involved in interorganizational business

capability modeling initiatives. The ﬁndings are even-

tually compared to the literature-based approaches of

modeling business capabilities in a single company to

ﬁnd differences as well as similarities.

Yílmaz, F., Feldmeier, J. and Matthes, F.

Deriving a Process for Interorganizational Business Capability Modeling through Case Study Analysis.

DOI: 10.5220/0010386306730680

In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2021) - Volume 2, pages 673-680

ISBN: 978-989-758-509-8

673

2 RELATED WORK

Before identifying steps of interorganizational busi-

ness capability modeling, we conducted a literature

review to ﬁnd relevant publications about the model-

ing steps of business capabilities within a single and

multiple organizations (Table 1).

Brits et al. (2007) propose a conceptual frame-

work for modeling business capabilities, where an

organization ﬁrst needs to extract its ”critical in-

formation”, including ”Business Entities”, ”Business

Rules”, ”Business Processes” and ”Strategic Arti-

facts”. In this framework, people are not part of re-

sources but a separate component.

Espa

na et al. (2015) propose strategies for mod-

eling business capabilities based on the capability-

driven design. All strategies consist of three steps:

”Capability Design”, ”Capability Evaluation”, and

”Capability Delivery”, with the research focus lying

on the design. Regardless of which starting point

for capability design is taken, an iterative structure

is proposed involving the business goals, processes,

and eventually the context affecting the capabilities

(Espa

na et al., 2015).

Zdravkovic et al. (2013) conducted research on

capability modeling and delivery using cloud ser-

vices. It is based on a meta-model for capability-

driven development (Stirna et al., 2012). The de-

sign, which is, next to the delivery, one of the two

perspectives in capability-driven development, starts

with modeling the enterprise. The Capability-Driven

Design and Development (CDD), which is the under-

lying methodology in the research of Espa

na (2015),

Zdravkovic (2013), and Stirna (2012), involves en-

terprise models, goals, processes, the underlying re-

sources, as well as concepts. It also considers the ap-

plication context in delivering the capabilities to allow

a fast reaction to changes (Zdravkovic et al., 2013;

Stirna et al., 2012).

Bondel et al. (2018) report from the modeling

of a business capability map (BCM) based on a case

study. The desired goal was the improvement of busi-

ness/IT alignment through the application of the BCM

(Bondel et al., 2018). A guideline for BCM creation

by The Open Group was used as a basis for their

approach (TheOpenGroup, 2018). The case study

started with the identiﬁcation and modeling of more

general, top-level capabilities ﬁrst.

Overall, these papers granted us profound knowl-

edge about the modeling steps of business capabili-

ties in a single organization, including the role of the

involved components. We further conducted a liter-

ate review on interorganizational business capability

modeling initiatives, methods and strategies. Due to

Table 1: Steps of BCM Modeling in Single Organization.

Step Authors

Use draft

capability model

Brits et al. (2007),

Zdravkovic et al.(2013),

Bondel et al. (2018)

Analyze business

processes

& functions

Brits et al. (2007),

Espa

na et al.(2015),

Zdravkovic et al. (2013)

Analyze visions

& goals

Brits et al. (2007),

Espa

na et al.(2015),

Zdravkovic et al. (2013)

Include

resources

Brits et al. (2007),

Zdravkovic et al. (2013),

Bondel et al. (2018)

Include

responsibilities

& roles

Brits et al. (2007),

Bondel et al. (2018)

Relations between

business

capabilities

Brits et al. (2007),

Espa

na et al.(2015),

Zdravkovic et al. (2013),

Bondel et al. (2018)

Deﬁne KPIs

Espa

na et al.(2015),

Zdravkovic et al. (2013)

Analyze application

context

Espa

na et al.(2015),

Zdravkovic et al. (2013)

Create BCM Bondel et al. (2018)

Evaluation and

reﬁnement

Brits et al. (2007),

Bondel et al. (2018)

the novelty of the topic, we were not surprised to only

ﬁnd a handful of papers that mention business capa-

bilities in an interorganizational context.

Bakhtiyari et al. (2015) introduce a capability-

based approach for enterprise architecture in business

network planning (Bakhtiyari et al., 2015). By using

a BCM, the individual partners align their capabilities

with the capabilities of a global capability map. This

is used to map global capabilities to requirements and

relations. However, a description for the creation of

the global BCM itself is not presented.

Fleischer et al. (2007) use business capabilities

to conﬁgure and evaluate value-added networks. This

allows improved coordination of the single nodes in-

side the network (Fleischer et al., 2007). The result of

their research is a process for conﬁguring the value-

added networks. A BCM is developed and used to

map business capabilities to the nodes of the network

and to compare the individual nodes’ BCMs. This

research does describe the identiﬁcation and model-

ing of business capabilities in an interorganizational

context, but the identiﬁed business capabilities are de-

rived from the added value of a single company and

include the outsourced capabilities of its partners and

suppliers to conﬁgure the nodes in the network. In

contrast, our research is focusing on the collaborative

identiﬁcation and modeling of common business ca-

pabilities by companies working in the same industry.

ICEIS 2021 - 23rd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

674

Overall, we did not ﬁnd literature proposing a general

process of deﬁning business capabilities in interorga-

nizational collaboration. Despite this result, the in-

dustry projects that are currently in progress underline

the actual relevance of this topic.

3 CASE STUDY

The main objective of our research is the identiﬁca-

tion of general steps in the process of modeling busi-

ness capabilities in interorganizational collaborations

with companies from the same industry. In order to

build profound knowledge in the area of business ca-

pability modeling, we ﬁrst conducted the literature re-

view as described in the previous section.

As our research uses different case studies as a ba-

sis for collecting information, we now want to present

the case studies. In the ﬁrst case study, the cooper-

ating enterprises are public service media companies

from one European country cooperating in a working

group. The second case study consists of public ser-

vice media companies from several European coun-

tries within a community of practice (Wenger et al.,

2002). The documents and protocols provided by

these case studies were analyzed to derive a draft pro-

cess of collaborative business capability modeling.

To enrich and evaluate the ﬁndings, we conducted

semi-structured interviews with case study partner 1,

3, and 4. Case study 3 is an interorganizational collab-

oration active in the gambling domain. The intervie-

wee is a research assistant, who was responsible for

planning, consulting, and implementing the project.

The fourth case study was carried out with an associ-

ation of organizations operating in the ﬁnance indus-

try. The interviewees were enterprise architects and

project leaders of involved companies. Their motiva-

tion for collaboration was to provide industry-speciﬁc

enterprise architecture artifacts, which are not only

limited to a BCM. A summary of involved organiza-

tions can be seen in Table 2, whereas our case study

design is illustrated in Figure 1.

4 RESULTS

4.1 Reasons and Expectations

Before deriving the process of modeling business ca-

pabilities in an interorganizational collaboration, the

individual reasons of the case studies’ members for

participating in the collaborative modeling activity

need to be analyzed (Yilmaz et al., 2020). This pro-

Design and Plan

Collect and Analyze

Evaluate and Conclude

• Conduction of literature

research

• Definition of research questions

• Analysis of protocols and

documents

• Deriving of a process for inter-

organizational business

capability modeling

• Conduction of semi-structured

interviews

• Conduction of surveys

Jan 2020

Feb 2020

March 2020

April 2020

May 2020

Jun 2020

Figure 1: Study Design acc. Runeson and H

ost (2009).

vides a holistic view of the projects and allows to

identify possible inﬂuencing factors.

The reason for the ﬁrst case study is to provide

a basis for mapping their application portfolio to the

capabilities. This is then used to visualize which

applications are used by the organizations in which

group of capabilities, which organizations are similar

or different in certain business capabilities with re-

gard to their application landscape, as well as reveal-

ing the potential for standards and consolidation. The

second case study’s aim is to establish an industry-

speciﬁc reference model of a BCM and exchange

knowledge and experience. In the third case study,

the involved companies want to identify and visualize

similar and overlapping capabilities to reveal the po-

tential for synergies, merging, and acquisitions, and

create a common understanding and taxonomy. The

fourth case study justiﬁed the collaborative modeling

of capabilities with the creation of a reference model

to be used by organizations operating in the same in-

dustry.

4.2 Structure of the Meetings

The ﬁrst case study’s modeling team consisted of the

heads of departments in IT and EA, project leaders of

IT- and EA projects, and enterprise architects. By in-

volving project leaders and heads of departments, the

companies ensure that employees with fundamental

knowledge about their own company’s business archi-

tecture can represent the enterprise appropriately as

well as guarantee high quality of the result. Addition-

ally, each member had to name a stand-in, who was

continuously kept up-to-date. Still, internal presenta-

tions and discussions with business leaders and execu-

tives as stakeholders of the project were performed in

order to collect feedback and impressions from a busi-

ness point of view. This was observed in the second

Deriving a Process for Interorganizational Business Capability Modeling through Case Study Analysis

675

Table 2: Case Study Partners.

Case Study

Partner 1

Case Study

Partner 2

Case Study

Partner 3

Case Study

Partner 4

Industry Broadcasting Broadcasting Gambling

Banking and

Finance

Source of

Information

Documents,

protocols and

semi-structured

interview

Documents and

protocols

Semi-structured

interview

Semi-structured

interview

Collaboration

Form

Working group

Community of

practice

Working group

Community of

practice

Collaboration

Goal

Basis for further

collaboration

Reference

architecture

Identify synergies and

create taxonomy

Reference

architecture

No. companies

involved

13 4 10 >30

Meeting Structure Physical Virtual and physical Physical Virtual

and fourth case study as well, where the relevance of

getting a cross-section of stakeholders, especially but

not only from the business side, was pointed out. The

meetings in the ﬁrst case study were physical as all

member organizations operated in the same country

and should take place every quarter with extra meet-

ings arranged when needed. In between the meet-

ings, feedback was collected inside each company by

the corresponding team members and presented in the

next meeting.

The second case study’s modeling team consisted

of enterprise architects working in each of the partic-

ipating organizations. The meetings were scheduled

every two weeks and were mostly virtual due to the

international scope of the project. Additionally, the

team conducted a physical workshop in the last third

of the project. In the meetings, the members provided

feedback regarding the current work results, gained

from internal discussions in their organization, which

was then revised by the members responsible for this

deliverable.

With the third case study project being solely

driven by strategic goals, namely the revealing of po-

tential for synergy and acquisitions, the people in-

volved in capability modeling were mostly business

leaders and heads of departments. This also illus-

trates the relevance of business capabilities for the

business perspective. It stands out that in the third

case study the interviewee, a research assistant act-

ing as an enterprise architect, was coordinating and

leading the project because most of the participants

were new to the ﬁeld of business capabilities or enter-

prise architecture itself. Here, the participants deliv-

ered ideas, information, and held discussions which

were collected by the enterprise architect, accumu-

lated and evaluated through several interviews and

presentations.

The modeling team of the fourth case study con-

sisted of enterprise architects and project managers.

In the ﬁrst case study we could observe an assign-

ment of responsibilities and tasks to subgroups. The

allocation of roles and responsibilities was performed

by the members of the second case study as well.

Here, certain members were responsible for collecting

and implementing the feedback provided by the indi-

vidual members and their stakeholders. Noteworthy

is the allocation of a coordinating role in case study

1, 2, and 3. Appointing a moderator to coordinate the

meetings as well as to collect and distribute feedback

and tasks is supporting a clear structure of the meet-

ings and serves as a contact person. The forming of

subgroups as in case studies 1 and 2 to collaborate on

speciﬁc topics was not conﬁrmed by case studies 3

and 4. Analyzing the ﬁrst two case studies, we could

identify a disagreement in the form and relevance of

the venue. This was conﬁrmed by case studies 3 and

4, as the meetings of case study 3 were physical in-

terviews and workshops, whereas the members of the

fourth group only had virtual meetings.

4.3 Collaborative Modeling of Business

Capabilities

Each case study used a draft business capability

model or business capability framework to get a bet-

ter understanding of the desired outcome, to use it as a

guideline, or as a foundation for their own modeling.

The draft capability model can be provided by one of

the members or obtained from external sources. In

the second case study enterprise architects decided to

use an external BCM to identify the appropriate level

of abstraction and used it as a basis for the develop-

ment of the own capability map. In addition to that,

case study 2 and also case studies 3 and 4 used ex-

isting BCMs from some of the members, whereas in

case study 1, a capability map from a company oper-

ICEIS 2021 - 23rd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

676

ating in the same industry, yet not participating in the

project was used as a draft. As in case study 4, the

BCMs which were brought in by members worked as

a foundation ﬁrst, but due to overlapping, duplication,

and the lack of following any particular standard, it

was decided to start from scratch, without using any

draft in order not to be biased. Using existing BCMs

from members or external sources provides a basic

understanding for the stakeholders and also for the de-

velopment team. In addition to that, it can be used as

the starting point for identifying business capabilities

and creating the BCM as it was done in case studies 2

and 4.

All projects started with the modeling of gen-

eral business capabilities before adding granularity

by modeling lower-level capabilities. This might be

caused by the usage of draft models and frameworks

that usually present a general, industry-independent

high-level architecture of an enterprise. It also makes

sense in the context of collaboration, as in a conglom-

erate of enterprises it may be easier to ﬁnd common

top-level capabilities, which can then be used as the

basis for further decomposition if needed, than ﬁnd-

ing consensus for speciﬁc low-level capabilities. Ad-

ditionally, as case studies 2 and 4 had the aim of

building an industry-speciﬁc reference architecture,

the needed degree of granularity was not as high as

one might expect in a single company where the BCM

is used for further, profound analysis. This was con-

ﬁrmed by the interviewees. The fear of revealing

valuable insights and therefore potentially losing an

advantage over the other members, which are still op-

erating in the same industry, by modeling more spe-

ciﬁc, lower-level capabilities was not found to be a

reason for starting with top-level capabilities. Busi-

ness capabilities themselves abstract from the under-

lying technologies and processes and hence would

not reveal many details. According to the intervie-

wees, in case of different views on the desired mod-

eling level of capabilities by the member organiza-

tions, discussions were held until a general agreement

was achieved. In case study 3, the modeling group

was working with a BCM from one of the members

as a foundation. This map was extended in the in-

terorganizational BCM creation by coloring the newly

added capabilities. This helped to reach a consensus

regarding the new capability map. Potential member-

exclusive capabilities were not found to be problem-

atic while modeling the capabilities and the creation

of the BCM. The case studies introduced up to six

categories to group the business capabilities. How-

ever, it was stated that grouping was not of great sig-

niﬁcance but only improves orientation in the BCM.

Case studies 2 and 4 explicitly allow the enterprise-

speciﬁc re-grouping of their grouping proposal. Ex-

amples for categories occurring in the capability maps

are ”Core”, ”Strategic”, and ”Support” capabilities,

which is also proposed by TOGAF (TheOpenGroup,

2018).

Modeling of business capabilities within a single

enterprise can be based on the company’s business

processes (Espa

na et al., 2015; Brits et al., 2007;

Zdravkovic et al., 2013). In case study 1, the underly-

ing business processes of the different organizations

were analyzed through the business process chains

and used for identifying the business capabilities but

were not modeled with them. During the evaluation

through interviews, it was pointed out that the busi-

ness processes and the internal structure of the orga-

nizations were too different to be embedded in the ca-

pabilities. Case studies 2, 3, and 4 did not involve the

business processes. Case study 3 analyzed the busi-

ness functions in order to identify the business capa-

bilities. Additionally, organization charts were ana-

lyzed. Even though business processes can be helpful

to identify or evaluate business capabilities, strict ad-

herence to business processes in modeling the capa-

bilities led to problems in the further progress of the

project, as the developed BCM closely resembled a

process map and caused the need for renewed discus-

sion and revision.

The company’s vision and goals can play a major

role in deﬁning the business capabilities within a sin-

gle company (Espa

na et al., 2015; Brits et al., 2007;

Zdravkovic et al., 2013). However, in all of the case

studies, the companies’ vision and goals were not an-

alyzed in the modeling process. The obtained BCMs

were throughout visualizing the current business ca-

pabilities and did not include a to-be view. Therefore,

a company’s goals and visions could be affecting the

ﬁnal usage of the obtained BCM but did not affect the

creation of it in an interorganizational approach.

In literature, responsibilities and roles are com-

ponents of business capabilities (Brits et al., 2007;

Bondel et al., 2018). In most of the case studies,

roles and tasks were no components of the modeled

capabilities. This seems natural in a conglomerate of

various organizations, where different skills and tasks

enable the capabilities, depending on each company.

Only in case study 3, people responsible for the ca-

pability were included in the capability description.

This was caused by the fact that the initiative used the

BCM from one member not only as templates for ori-

entation but extended them with the capabilities from

other members. The other case studies did not include

responsibilities.

The creation of a common vocabulary seems to

be crucial as we observed a shared glossary in case

Deriving a Process for Interorganizational Business Capability Modeling through Case Study Analysis

677

Developing Team

Organization nOrganization 1

Project

Managers

Enterprise

Architects

Domain

Experts

Project

Managers

Enterprise

Architects

Domain

Experts

Organization 1

Organizational

Components

Organization n

Business

Objects

Business

Processes

Business

Functions

analyzed by

Business

Objects

Business

Processes

Business

Functions

Draft BCM

analyzed by

contribute

Business Capabilities

Top – level BCs

Sub – level BCs

aggregate

decompose

define

refine

Common

Vocabulary

Business Capability Map

Top – level BCM

Sub – level BCM

evaluate

create

use

revise

create

use

visualized

obtain

optional

Strategic

Core

Support

Evaluation

Components

Organization nOrganization 1

Presentation

Interviews

Use Cases &

Activities

Presentation

Interviews

Use Cases &

Activities

Strategic

Core

Support

Strategic

Core

Support

Figure 2: The derived reference process of interorganizational business capability modeling.

studies 2 and 4. Since these two groups contain or-

ganizations from different countries, they determined

that the common language is English. In case study 4,

the interviewees explicitly mentioned their focus on

differentiating business capability names and names

of the service domains. This is meant to prevent con-

fusion within the member group. Case study 1 de-

veloped and introduced a glossary and naming con-

vention to provide a common language and vocabu-

lary in the ﬁrst meetings. At the same time the ﬁnal-

ized business capabilities were documented including

a description, the outcome of the capability, and a ref-

erence to the position on the BCM. The descriptions

introduced and followed this common vocabulary.

In general, the business capabilities modeled in

the case studies did not embed resources, applica-

tions or technologies. Even if the organization’s

technologies play a negligible role, as the before men-

tioned internal structure and processes result in a va-

riety of used technology. Only in the ﬁrst case study,

applications and technologies used by each member

were collected, analyzed, and put in relation to the

capabilities, which was caused by the additional col-

laboration target of building an application portfolio

that should be mapped to the BCM. Nevertheless, the

technologies were not modeled in the ﬁnal descrip-

tion of the capabilities or in the BCM. In case study

4, it was pointed out that the technologies, roles, and

business processes should not be modeled in the in-

terorganizational BCM.

The identiﬁed business capabilities, their descrip-

tions, sub-capabilities, and interrelations were con-

stantly evaluated. This was done by presenting the

BCM to the stakeholders of each company to collect

feedback. But also use cases and activities were col-

lected from organizations and used to validate the ca-

pabilities. In general, there was a high level of support

and involvement of the business leaders and stake-

holders from each contributing organization. The

evaluation resulted in changes of capability names,

the further decomposition of a former top-level ca-

pability, or the aggregation of sub-level capabilities

until consensus was reached. In case study 2, the

group focused mainly on modeling one core capabil-

ity at a time until all members agreed on the naming,

description, and the sub-capabilities. As the point of

view got extended and shifted, the name, description

or the composition of sub-capabilities to core capa-

bilities had to be revised and adjusted. This iterative

process validated the ﬁnal capabilities and guaranteed

the fulﬁllment of each organizations’ expectations.

Based on our observation in the case studies, we

designed a reference model visualizing the steps and

components of an interorganizational business capa-

bility modeling initiative (Figure 2). By following the

guideline, organizations operating in the same indus-

try can collaboratively develop a common BCM.

We suggest to begin with the developing team

consisting of enterprise architects, domain experts,

and department heads. The developing team can as-

sign responsibilities, e.g., a moderator for the meet-

ings or someone to incorporate the feedback. The

ICEIS 2021 - 23rd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

678

structure of meetings, and their regularity has to be

set. The development and use of a common language

and vocabulary are crucial and highly recommended.

With a common glossary developed, the modeling

team analyses the organizations’ charts, business pro-

cesses, business objects, and business functions to

identify common top-level capabilities. Identiﬁed

business capabilities do not embed the underlying

business processes, people, and roles as it might not

be useful or even possible with multiple organiza-

tions involved. Further, the mapping of the underlying

technology and application is optional. The identiﬁ-

cation and modeling can be supported by the usage

of a draft business capability model. A draft BCM

can also introduce stakeholders or members of the

modeling team, who may be unfamiliar with the con-

cept of business capabilities and illustrate the desired

outcome. Our approach recommends the top-down

approach, due to the background of the interorgani-

zational context. The identiﬁed top-level capabilities

should be extended with a description using the com-

mon vocabulary and be illustrated in a BCM to visu-

alize relations between the capabilities. The top-level

capabilities can be grouped to facilitate the identiﬁ-

cation of relations between the capabilities and their

role in the organizations. We suggest the grouping

into three categories as proposed by The Open Group

(2018) and Ulrich et al. (2011): Core capabilities,

support capabilities, and strategic capabilities.

This ﬁrst version of the BCM is presented in the

individual organizations to stakeholders and domain

experts to collect feedback and to evaluate the ﬁrst

version. With the feedback incorporated, the BCM

can be adjusted. This is an iterative process involving

constant feedback and evaluation from the stakehold-

ers and revision by the developing team. If a bottom-

up approach is chosen, the speciﬁc lower-level capa-

bilities should be grouped and their relations illus-

trated, before evaluating them using the stakeholders’

feedback. With many organizations involved, this can

bear a challenge and is only recommended if neces-

sary for the collaboration goal. Aggregating the low-

level business capabilities to higher-level capabilities

involves the agreement of the modeling team as well

as consensus with the stakeholders. In general, ag-

gregation of capabilities can result in changes of re-

lations or the composition in other layers, therefore a

holistic view, achieved through the BCM, is crucial.

The BCM should allow adjustments during the mod-

eling, e.g., decomposing former top-level capabilities

and vice versa. The degree of granularity for each

business capability depends on its intended purpose.

If the aim is the identiﬁcation of synergies and poten-

tials for consolidations a high granularity is useful. If

deﬁning a holistic reference architecture the granular-

ity can be lower. Members of the developing team

can submit change requests for the BCM if necessary

in the later stage.

5 DISCUSSION

In this paper, we introduced a reference process of

interorganizational business capability modeling de-

rived from multiple case studies, in order to answer

our research questions deﬁned in section 1.

We could observe different approaches of collabo-

rative BCM development. First, we identiﬁed the rel-

evance of draft BCMs either submitted by members

or obtained from external sources. A common glos-

sary is an integral part of the process and is created

at the beginning of as well as applied and reﬁned dur-

ing the modeling process. The developing team con-

sists of enterprise architects as well as domain experts

and department heads. By analyzing the companies’

organization charts, functions, processes, and objects

the developing team can further identify and describe

capabilities. The derived process is of iterative na-

ture, where each participant collects feedback from its

company and stakeholders, which is merged and used

to revise the capabilities. Responsibilities should be

allocated inside the developing team to provide struc-

ture and a clear contact persons. After coming to an

agreement of a ﬁnal BCM, the result is being eval-

uated by the members regularly in order to ﬁnd any

deviations or needs for changes in the BCM. Due to

the stability in the nature of a BCM, major changes in

the BCM were not expected and observed.

The modeling of business capabilities in collab-

oration was found to be less driven by the compa-

nies’ vision and goals as in the single enterprise. Even

though the involved companies’ technologies are an-

alyzed, they play a minor role and are not modeled

within the capabilities. Roles should not be taken

into account in collaborative projects. BCMs obtained

through interorganizational collaboration are found to

be less granular than in a single organization. The in-

troduction of a common vocabulary is not necessarily

needed in a single organization whereas it is an impor-

tant component in the interorganizational approach.

The top management and stakeholders are usually

supporting interorganizational collaboration and pro-

vide valuable feedback, whereas this is not generally

the case in a single organization with, e.g., capabil-

ity modeling initiatives driven by the IT department.

Further, we could not conﬁrm the application of KPIs.

The reason for this can be the early stage of BCM us-

age in most of the observed cases.

Deriving a Process for Interorganizational Business Capability Modeling through Case Study Analysis

679

6 LIMITATION

As our ﬁndings are based on case studies, which gen-

erally have limitations such as validity, generalizabil-

ity, and reliability (Runeson and H

ost, 2009). We

used several methods to cope with these limitations.

To ensure construct validity the interviews were con-

ducted with employees from different organizations

with the necessary background. By conducting multi-

ple case studies from various industries with different

collaboration motivations and goals, the derived pro-

cess can be applied to most interorganizational collab-

oration projects. Therefore, the generalizability as-

pect is addressed. The reliability aspect is ensured

by traceable analysis and results. To fulﬁll this crite-

rion, the interviews were following a previously de-

ﬁned guideline reviewed by a second researcher.

7 CONCLUSION

In this paper, we presented related work in the ﬁeld

of business capabilities in a single- and interorganiza-

tional context. As a foundation, we conducted a litera-

ture review to obtain profound knowledge about busi-

ness capabilities and their modeling in single organi-

zations as well as available frameworks. Through the

analysis of four case studies, we identiﬁed the steps of

interorganizational business capability modeling. By

conducting interviews, we could iteratively evaluate

and revise the derived steps. This resulted in the pro-

cess of interorganizational business capability model-

ing for companies operating in the same industry as

illustrated in Figure 2.

Based on our research, future studies could be

conducted on the composition and size of the teams

in up-scaled projects. More organizations and stake-

holders involved in the modeling process can increase

the complexity and communication effort in the de-

veloping team.

REFERENCES

Bakhtiyari, A. R., Barros, A., and Russell, N. (2015). En-

terprise architecture for business network planning: A

capability-based approach. In International Confer-

ence on Advanced Information Systems Engineering,

pages 257–269. Springer.

Bondel, G., Faber, A., and Matthes, F. (2018). Reporting

from the implementation of a business capability map

as business-it alignment tool. In 2018 IEEE 22nd In-

ternational Enterprise Distributed Object Computing

Workshop (EDOCW), pages 125–134. IEEE.

Brits, J., Botha, G., and Herselman, M. (2007). Conceptual

framework for modeling business capabilities. In Pro-

ceedings of the Informing Science and IT Education

Joint Conference, pages 151–170.

Diirr, B. and Cappelli, C. (2018). A systematic literature

review to understand cross-organizational relationship

management and collaboration. In Proceedings of the

51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sci-

ences.

Drews, P. and Schirmer, I. (2014). From enterprise archi-

tecture to business ecosystem architecture: Stages and

challenges for extending architectures beyond organi-

zational boundaries. In 2014 IEEE 18th International

Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference

Workshops and Demonstrations, pages 13–22. IEEE.

Espa

na, S., Grabis, J., Henkel, M., Koc¸, H., Sandkuhl,

K., Stirna, J., and Zdravkovic, J. (2015). Strate-

gies for capability modelling: analysis based on ini-

tial experiences. In International Conference on Ad-

vanced Information Systems Engineering, pages 40–

52. Springer.

Fleischer, J., Herm, M., and Ude, J. (2007). Business capa-

bilities as conﬁguration elements of value added net-

works. Production Engineering, 1(2):187–192.

Moore, J. . (1996). The Death of Competition: Leader-

ship and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems.

HarperBusiness.

Runeson, P. and H

ost, M. (2009). Guidelines for conduct-

ing and reporting case study research in software engi-

neering. Empirical software engineering, 14(2):131.

Stirna, J., Grabis, J., Henkel, M., and Zdravkovic, J. (2012).

Capability driven development–an approach to sup-

port evolving organizations. In IFIP Working Confer-

ence on The Practice of Enterprise Modeling, pages

117–131. Springer.

TheOpenGroup (2018). The TOGAF Standard, Version 9.2.

Ulrich, W. and Rosen, M. (2011). The business capability

map: the” rosetta stone” of business. IT Alignment

Enterprise Architecture, 14.

Webster, J. and Watson, R. T. (2002). Analyzing the past

to prepare for the future: Writing a literature review.

MIS quarterly, pages xiii–xxiii.

Wenger, E., McDermott, R. A., and Snyder, W. (2002). Cul-

tivating communities of practice: A guide to manag-

ing knowledge. Harvard Business Press.

Yilmaz, F., Akdemir, D., and Matthes, F. (2020). Why

would enterprise architects work together?-a multiple

case study. In Americas Conference on Information

Systems (AMCIS), Virtual.

Yin, R. K. (2017). Case study research and applications:

Design and methods. Sage publications.

Zdravkovic, J., Stirna, J., Henkel, M., and Grabis, J. (2013).

Modeling business capabilities and context dependent

delivery by cloud services. In International Confer-

ence on Advanced Information Systems Engineering,

pages 369–383. Springer.

ICEIS 2021 - 23rd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

680