Why not include traditional BIZBOK concepts?

Introduction

The Metamodel was designed from the ground up to support dynamic traceability, digital implementation, and strategic alignment across federated organisations. In doing so, it departs from several legacy business architecture constructs, including BIZBOK’s approach to capability decomposition. This decision is deliberate and grounded in the needs of large, complex environments where business architecture must serve as a bridge between operational reality and strategic execution.

Capability decomposition creates artificial structural rigidity

In BIZBOK, capabilities are often broken down into levels (Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, etc.) in a top-down, hierarchical fashion. While this can offer clarity in small organisations or static environments, it quickly becomes problematic in modern, dynamic settings:

• It imposes a rigid taxonomy that often fails to reflect how work is actually done or where value is delivered.

• Decomposition is typically subjective, with different practitioners arriving at different structures for the same organisation.

• It reinforces a one-size-fits-all mental model, limiting flexibility and adaptability.

The Orthogramic Metamodel avoids this by treating each capability as an atomic unit defined by its function, inputs, outputs, performance, and alignment—not its position in a tree. Capabilities can be linked through relationships, shared attributes, and domain mappings, but they are not constrained by fixed hierarchical decomposition.

Value delivery is better captured through value streams, services, and initiatives

Where BIZBOK relies on decomposed capabilities to trace execution, the Orthogramic Metamodel leverages multiple domains to capture how value is delivered:

• Value Streams define end-to-end flows of value.

• Services describe operational delivery to stakeholders and customers.

• Initiatives provide traceable execution vehicles aligned to strategy.

This multi-dimensional approach enables better granularity and realism in modelling, without the artificial scaffolding of nested capabilities.

Dynamic alignment demands flexibility, not static decomposition

In large enterprises and regulated sectors, business architecture must be continuously aligned with evolving strategies, stakeholder needs, and regulatory changes. Static capability maps, especially those enforced through hierarchical decomposition, do not accommodate this change well. The Orthogramic Metamodel supports:

• Lateral relationships between capabilities (e.g. enabling, dependent, shared)

• Capability alignment with strategic objectives, policies, and customer needs

• Reconfigurable clusters of capabilities for initiatives, programmes, or services

This relational structure is more agile, easier to automate, and better aligned with how real organisations evolve.

Automation and schema-first modelling require consistency

BIZBOK’s decompositional flexibility can be an advantage in whiteboard modelling, but it presents a challenge for automation. The schema-first approach of the Orthogramic Metamodel requires domain entities to be consistently structured across use cases. By removing the variability introduced by decomposition, the Metamodel ensures:

• Capabilities are comparable across units and organisations

• APIs and analytical tools can reason about capability structures without interpretation

• Strategic recommendations and gap analysis can be generated programmatically

Conclusion

The Orthogramic Metamodel does not reject the value of understanding how capabilities relate—it simply chooses a more modern, relational, and schema-based approach. Rather than imposing a rigid top-down decomposition, it enables flexible mappings, traceability, and interaction across domains. This supports strategic agility, federated ownership, and the digital automation of business architecture in ways BIZBOK’s static models were never designed to achieve.