Process vs. Capability: A Reflection from a Practitioner’s Perspective

Within many large companies Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) and Business Process Management (BPM) have established as management approaches over the last decades. While EAM pursues a holistic view on the elements of a company and their relations to each other, whereby “process” and “capability” are two main elements, BPM specializes in the design and optimization of processes. Although both approaches are mature and a lot of material has been published already, some questions come up in the practical context of managing processes and capabilities as well as their relation to each other. Based on the foundation about capability management as part of EAM and about BPM, the paper elaborates on two main challenges in the context of managing “capabilities” and “processes” within a company from a practitioner’s perspective: (1) Questioned value add of having both a capability map and a process landscape, (2) Uncertainty on which levels capabilities and processes should be related to each other. Furthermore, for those observations a proposal is provided on how to address those challenges.