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For years, business capability models have been useful to the people who understood what they were for.
Architects used them to stabilise conversations that cut across systems, teams, and vendors. Business leaders used them to describe what the organisation actually needed to be able to do, independent of structure or solution.
They were practical, durable, and quietly effective within the circles that valued them.
What they were not was a mainstream finance artefact.
Not because they lacked rigour, but because traditional financial views rarely needed them. Cost centres, budgets, and org charts were usually sufficient to explain spend, assign accountability, and justify decisions.
That assumption is now under strain.
Chief financial officers are taking a closer interest in capability models, not because the models have changed, but because the questions finance is being asked have.
Cost overruns are proving stubborn. Efficiency programs deliver short-term relief but fail to bend the long-term curve. Technology spend continues to rise even as headcount stabilises. Repeated cost-out initiatives target the same areas again and again, with diminishing returns.
The issue is not effort. It is visibility.
Org charts explain accountability, but not cost behaviour. System inventories explain assets, but not effort. Budgets explain allocations, but not why costs persist.
Capability models fill that gap.
By framing the enterprise around what it must be able to do, rather than how it is organised or which systems it owns, capability models expose structural cost drivers that financial views routinely miss. They show where multiple teams, platforms, and vendors are collectively enabling the same outcome, often unknowingly. They reveal capabilities that are disproportionately expensive to operate relative to the value they generate.
For CFOs under sustained pressure to explain cost structures, this perspective is increasingly difficult to ignore.
What makes capability models particularly powerful is their neutrality. They sit above organisational politics and technology preferences. They allow finance, operations, and technology leaders to have the same conversation, using a shared language, without immediately falling into defensive positions.
This matters because cost conversations are no longer abstract.
Cloud consumption is variable and opaque. Vendor contracts are bundled and overlapping. Advanced analytics and AI capabilities are embedded inside platforms, not neatly itemised.
Traditional cost centres struggle to keep up.
Capability-based views allow CFOs to ask better questions:
Which capabilities are growing in cost year-on-year, regardless of restructure? Where are we paying multiple times to achieve the same outcome? Which capabilities are genuinely differentiating, and which are simply expensive to maintain?
Perhaps most importantly, capability models change the tone of cost reduction conversations.
Instead of cutting budgets across functions, leaders can make informed decisions about where to simplify, where to invest, and where to stop doing things altogether. Cost becomes a consequence of capability choice, not a blunt instrument applied after the fact.
This does not make capability modelling a finance tool. But it does make it a financial enabler.
CFOs are not looking for another framework. They are looking for explanations that stand up to scrutiny.
Capability models, quietly and without fanfare, are starting to do exactly that.
