Patent ID: 8655711

Claim:
A method, in a computer architecture, for using a plurality of weighted links between enterprise resource planning data of an organization and business capabilities of the organization to facilitate making business-related decisions based on how a specified business capability contributes to a specified portion of enterprise resource planning data, the method comprising: an act of a computing system, including a processor and memory, accessing a schema-based model that models a business architecture for the organization, the schema-based model modeling a plurality of interrelated business capabilities for the organization at a specified level of detail, each business capability representing a different type of work the organization performs; an act of the computing system accessing a schema-based representation of enterprise resource planning data for the organization, the enterprise resource planning data formatted in a generic format for purposes of report generation related to industrial classification and/or regulatory compliance, the enterprise resource planning data lacking organization-specific formatting, the enterprise resource planning data including a plurality of different portions, each different portion relating to a different type of business-related function of the organization; an act of the computing system identifying a plurality of express schema-based links between the enterprise resource planning data and the plurality of interrelated business capabilities, each schema based-link linking a particular business capability to a corresponding portion of the enterprise resource planning data that is transformed during a business process involving the particular business capability, each schema based-link is weighted by including in each express schema-based link a corresponding property value that is indicative of a relative contribution of the particular business capability to the corresponding portion of the enterprise resource planning data; based on the identified plurality of express schema-based links and the corresponding property values weighting each link, an act of the computing system generating a contribution mapping, the contribution mapping reflecting the relative contribution that each of the plurality of interrelated business capabilities makes to each of the plurality of different portions of the enterprise resource planning data; and an act of making a business related decision with respect to a particular portion of enterprise resource planning data based on the contribution mapping, wherein the decision is made by an act of aligning the goals of an organizational project with the relative contributions of the business capabilities.