Master Thesis Fatih Yilmaz

Today, increasing complexity of company’s application portfolio became a major challenge for enterprise architects. Over time changing business requirements lead to a historically grown application portfolio, which is difficult to manage, cause high costs and cannot be adapted easily to meet new requirements. Consequently, Application Portfolio Management (APM) was introduced as an approach to manage applications from a holistic point of view. Nevertheless, it is difficult to steer a portfolio containing hundreds or thousands of applications. Business Capability Modeling could be an approach to address this problem. Business capabilities provide insights into the company’s competences which are necessary to process value creating activities and create a holistic view of the organization’s main functions. This view is captured in a business capability map. Beside providing an overview, it can also be used for strategic planning of IT. By mapping underlying IT components to business capabilities, the status of the application architecture can be visualized and better managed. Therefore, it attracts in- creasing attention in the Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) community over the last years.

Capability-based APM primarily describes the combination of APM and Business Capability Modeling. By means of this approach, this thesis presents Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to evaluate the application architecture of business capabilities. Currently, KPIs are used to evaluate the application architecture in many different ways. But mostly they provide very limited information, by measuring only a few application specific attributes. Hence, one goal of this thesis was to develop higher-level KPIs in order to provide a more general view. By conducting review on relevant literature and interviews with experts, three KPIs are developed, which evaluate the application architecture in terms of complexity, quality and failure impact. Since companies have recognized the benefits of Business Capability Modeling, many of them have implemented a capability map. Therefore, the second goal of the thesis was to evaluate the use of the business capability map in order to visualize the application architecture’s status. For this purpose, a prototype is presented based on a suitable design which is identified by literature review and requirements analysis.