Master Thesis Josephine Graul

Collecting and Analyzing Cases of Inter-Organizational Business Capability Modeling

Abstract

In times of digitization and frequently changing business environments, organizations are increasingly faced with the challenges of managing their scarce resources and aligning business and information technology (IT) aspects of the company. Additionally, to remain innovative, they are progressively engaging in collaborations with suppliers, customers and competitors. In this way, they want to achieve synergy effects and exchange knowledge. To support the new ways of working together, inter-enterprise architecture is becoming more relevant. One instrument of this major IT governance function are business capability maps. Originally designed for the use within a single company,  they are becoming increasingly relevant for alignment between different organizations.

However, the research is still limited in this domain. Therefore, this thesis identifies cases and shows the status quo of the use of inter-organizational business capability maps. The influence of factors such as company size or industry focus is also taken into account. Moreover, the research aims to identify reasons and challenges practitioners associate with the introduction and usage of capability modeling. The focus is on inter-organizational application scenarios. Nevertheless, also the intra-organizational use is considered as the findings can be transferred and form the basis for analysis in business networks. To get a profound and holistic understanding, a mixed-method approach is employed. At first, a short literature review is conducted as a theoretical foundation. Afterwards, data is collected through a web-based survey, followed by five semi-structured interviews to elaborate on certain aspects in depth. The results show an upward trend in the usage of business capability maps and that they are a suitable tool to support inter-enterprise architecture. In total, the nine most relevant reasons and ten categories of challenges are presented in detail.