Skip the Blank Page:
An Open Capability Catalogue

The Blank Page

Implementing an EA function can be quite a daunting task the first time. One aspect in particular is very time consuming: building a business capability model from the ground up.

Commercial EA solution provides some very thin models to start with and industry specific models sometimes exist but they are either very spread out or behind paywalls. Meanwhile nearly every team starts from zero, and reinvents the same hierarchy.

In practice, the capability hierarchy is largely the same across organisations operating in the same industry, and where it does differ, it differs in predictable ways. Starting from a vetted reference and adapting it is therefore faster and more consistent than building from scratch, and it lets the team focus its energy on the work that genuinely moves the needle.

The Catalogue

The Turbo EA Business Capability Reference Catalogue is an open source, MIT-licensed catalogue of 9,200+ business capabilities across multiple industries, browseable online at catalog.turbo-ea.org and forkable on GitHub.

The structure follows the conventional three levels, where L1 captures broad domains, L2 captures sub-domains, and L3 captures the working level at which applications can sensibly be mapped. Each capability has a stable identifier, a noun-phrase name, and a definition that follows a few firm conventions: names avoid verbs, vendor references, and geographic qualifiers, so the catalogue stays usable independently of how the business happens to be organised today. Renames are allowed at any time, but identifiers never change, which keeps any downstream mapping intact.

The catalogue is intentionally tool-agnostic. It is designed to work natively inside Turbo EA, but it is just as usable in LeanIX, Ardoq, Bizzdesign, MEGA, a SharePoint spreadsheet, or any other tool that can ingest a CSV file.

How to Use It

The catalogue ships in four formats so it can fit whatever toolchain you already have in place.

Browse and export from the website. Open catalog.turbo-ea.org to search the hierarchy and read the definitions, then export the slice you want as a CSV file that can be imported directly into LeanIX, Ardoq, Bizzdesign, MEGA, or any other EAM tool. There is no account to create and no software to install.

Fork the repository on GitHub. The canonical source is YAML with one file per L1, so the entire catalogue lives as plain text under version control. Fork vincentmakes/turbo-ea-capabilities into your own organisation, edit the files, run the linter, and raise pull requests internally. The diffs stay clean and reviewable, so changes can be governed in the same way as any other piece of code.

Install the Python package. Running pip install turbo-ea-capabilities pulls a versioned copy of the full catalogue, which is convenient for pipelines, ETL jobs, and air-gapped environments where reaching the public web is not an option.

Call the JSON API. Static endpoints serve the full catalogue, individual trees, or single capabilities by identifier, so any front-end or script can consume the data with a single HTTP request.

Inside Turbo EA

If you already run Turbo EA, the catalogue is integrated as a first-class data source. You can pick an industry layer, click import, and have the Capability Heatmap, Process Navigator, and Matrix reports populated within minutes rather than weeks.

When a new version of the upstream catalogue is published, you can pull the updates into your tenant without losing any of the customisations you have layered on top, because the stable identifiers ensure that local edits remain attached to the correct capabilities.

Get Started

1. Open catalog.turbo-ea.org and locate your industry, then skim the L1s and drill into a few L2s to get a feel for the granularity and tone of the definitions.
2. Pick five capabilities you would expect to see in your own organisation and check whether they exist in the catalogue, where they sit in the hierarchy, and how they are defined.
3. Export the relevant slice as CSV from the website, or fork the GitHub repository if you prefer to keep your version under version control.
4. Rename the small number of items that do not match your internal vocabulary, and add the handful that are genuinely unique to your organisation.
5. Import the resulting CSV, YAML, or JSON into your EA tool, or use the native importer if you are running Turbo EA.
6. Map your applications to the imported capabilities, build a heatmap from the result, and use it to anchor the next conversation with your business sponsors.

The catalogue is free, MIT-licensed, and ready to use today, so there is no reason to start a new EA function from a blank page.