| For what it may be worth, in 2005 we published a book called "Capability Cases" see http://capabilitycases.org and http://capabilitycases.org/cases.html for some sample capability cases. Also a number of ontologies to represent the model and the capability cases. Our meaning of capability in this book is focused on the business case for a software capability. Examples would be 'Expert Locator' or 'Retrieval Assistant" etc. Our motivation was the early part of the software development lifecycle where 'Capability Cases' are used as catalysts in an analogy to architects who show building sketches to frame discussions of how a new building might be (called a "Charrette")
Our work was based on Michael Porter's value model (forces, challenges, outcomes, etc), balanced scorecards, the performance prism work in Europe, Soft Systems Methodology and Pattern Languages. Pavithra, I totally agree with Ian. It absolutely cannot be a process. In your example, Vendor Management may be a function but it is not a capability. The capability would focus on why you want to manage vendors. Instead that might be - Ensure Product Sourcing (or something like that). Vendor management may be a sublevel 3 capabillity as there are many other ways to source products. If you define your capability at Vendor Management, you'll never see opportunities for doing product sourcing differently. You're stuck in the present, and the only improvements you'll make will be small, incremental ones that won't really have an impact. It all depends on why you're doing enterprise architecture. If you're doing EA to manage technology, you might better do configuration management. Anytime I see a spaghetti diagram presented as an enterprise architecture, I know there really isn't any design work going on -- its all about configuration management. If you're doing EA to align all your resources with your business goals (think future), then you need to start with capabilities, document current state resource alignment, get all the stakeholders in the room to agree on what future state looks like at the business level, and realign your resources. Best regards, Denise
From: Pavithra [pavithra_kenjige@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2013 10:08 PM
To: BEDFORD, DENISE A.D.; Ontology Summit 2013 discussion; Hans Polzer; 'Ian Bailey'
Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] Capability
Denise,
Thanks for being specific. In Walmart example, the capability " aggressive vendor management" is a business process with a future state where as "Vendor Management" would be a function. But clarification sake, it is easier to do a functional decomposition first.. then work with business process. Because process has to apply to something.. and functions are visually more concrete. Even though they are different kind of modeling.
But Ian said a capability can not be a process?? So what do you have to say about that?
Pavithra
All, Sorry to come into this discussion late, and my apologies if I am off target. I teach Business Architecture in our new School of Digital Sciences. In the context of enterprise architecture a capability is defined as what an organization does to deliver value to its stakeholders. The purpose of identifying and documenting capabilities in Business Architecture is to ensure that ALL of the organizations resources are being leveraged to support the business goals. This means people, data, information, applications and lastly technology. In fact, technology (not applications) in the capability modeling and resourcing process is only aligned with applications and generally not directly linked to capabilities. All of the classification/matrix models align with capabilities, except for technology which only aligns with applications. Capabilities are only associated with business processes at sublevel 2 or 3, and then only for the purpose of critically evaluating whether they actually support a capability. But, capabillities are not the same thing as a business function. If you approach capabilities as a function, you will not be able to surface redundancies and variations across the organization. If you approach capabillities as you do a function, you will not be able to see the future state - you anchor on what is. The same problem with focusing on business processes - taking a bottom up view always anchors you in the present. Apologies if this speaks to a question you're not discussing. Best regards, Denise
, Hans, Ian provided a link to an HBR article. A part of that article discusses "capabilities-driven strategy" "Let’s look at Wal-Mart to see how a capabilities-driven strategy works. Most attribute the chain’s success to its impressive logistics operations or its ability to get vendors to fall in line. But having one or two superior capabilities is not enough. What really underlies Wal-Mart’s competitive advantage is a system of mutually reinforcing capabilities that lowers total value chain cost in a differentiated way. The giant discount retailer achieves maximum efficiency by integrating four capabilities: aggressive vendor management, expert point-of-sale data analytics, superior logistics, and rigorous working-capital management. Every one of these capabilities reinforces the others and supports the company’s strategic purpose to deliver “everyday low prices” to consumers " In Enterprise Architecture, for Business Architecture, one has to develop, the mission, vision, goals and objectives, which would address similar strategic planning. Capabilities, support such goals & objectives. One of the purpose of developing Enterprise Architecture is to increase operational efficiency by using technology to support your business. When you have to develop systems to increase operational efficiency, in support of the business, and have to incorporate the capabilities, the capabilities would become Internal business functions and would have internal business requirements with measurements in place.. Thank you, Pavithra
Pavithra, The issue regarding terms such as “capability” and “enterprise” is that they are often used to convey implicit context and scope. But the context and scope is best left to a separate set of modifiers (or dimensional specifiers). You’ll note that the “C” in the name of the NCOIC “SCOPE” model stands for “Capability”. The point of doing that was to highlight that all of the terms in the SCOPE acronym are usually associated with implicit scope, but they really don’t specify any explicit scope by themselves. For example, an enterprise can be something that an individual embarks upon, or even just the individual him/herself. But of course, most people use the term “enterprise” to convey a fairly large scale entity or activity, something on the order of hundreds or thousands of people, say, or even larger. Similarly, the term capability as used in today’s session primarily originated in the defense domain to convey large scale ability/potential to accomplish operational mission objectives (the airplane “performance envelop” example used being actually a fairly small-scale illustration of that usage). Of course, you are correct that in a more constrained scope context, capability might be a feature of a specific product or system (other words contributing to the SCOPE acronym). SCOPE was intended to serve as a semi-quantitative framework for describing (or exploring/investigating/eliciting) the scope of any such entity or activity (the “O” in SCOPE being “Operation”, but it could be “Ontology” with a little bit of modification), rather than relying on people intuiting some particular scope from the term used to represent the entity or activity implicitly. Hans Ian,
I don;t want to repeat, but in
In general for software development, a capability is a "feature" or a " function" or a "service" that the product or software is capable of providing. As you said, it is used at a strategic level and later mapped to requirements and systems and so forth.
An use case specifies the usage. It is developed in futuristic way to help the designers to capture how that "feature" or a " function" or a "service" be used by the users ( actor or system when automated) and the behavior of the product or software. It is developed during detail requirement stage!
Scenarios should capture all different ways that "feature" or a " function" or a "service" can be used and exceptions and error handling.
Test cases should include all the scenarios with unique sets of data to capture all possible types of input and exceptions and error handling.
Matrices are developed based on the correct behavior of the test cases .. 0 tolerance is one such matrix.
It was part of RUP development life cycle.. . Rational Rose developed Use case modeling initially. They also supported Object Oriented Modeling and UML. hope that helps.
Thanks,
Pavithra
Folks, The concept of capability as a tool for strategic planning originates in the military. I think McKinsey did the original work on this in the 90s for UK MOD and also some work in US DoD. Capability is explicitly NOT about process. The whole idea is to allow strategic thinking without resorting to design of processes. Capabilities should be expressed in terms of outcomes - what, not how. Once you've worked out your capabilities, you can think about the processes and systems needed to deliver the capability. The concept has now found much wider use in the commercial world - see http://hbr.org/2010/06/the-coherence-premium/ar/1 and it also seems to have found a home in IT for portfolio management and application rationalisation, though whether those guys stick to the process-independence rule is somewhat questionable. It's a very tricky concept to model in an ontology. In IDEAS we take the approach that a capability is the set of all possible things that are capable of achieving a particular outcome. Capabilities can have measures of effectiveness which constrain the members of the set. This approach seems to work for military architectures and strategic acquisition planning. We then have the concept of a capability configuration (people, systems and processes) that deliver the capability (these become subtypes of the capability) and finally fielded capabilities - physical things that are instances of the capability configuration and also therefore instances of the capability. MODAF works this, and I think DoDAF does too. Chris Partridge did a lot of work on this for us - esp. around the dispositional aspects of capability. Regards
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Thank you again.
Regarding the discussion about "Capability", I would like to add my two sense to it here.
A capability can be translated as a function or service that meets certain set of requirements as defined by stake holders/organization/interested parties . If it is accomplished or performed by an "actor" or another "system" it can be written as use case or multiple use cases. Scenarios can be used to handle multiple dimension of the capability. Even tho use cases look simplistic, they are not necessarily that simple, the scenarios can handle complexities to certain level..
Thanks,
Pavithra to the organizers for the opportunity to present (which gave the the opportunity to develop the ideas a bit further). to the participants for their questions, they will help make the next communication better. RPI Tetherless World Constellation Center for Technology in Government iChoose Ontology Development team for being great collaborators and for the opportunity to work on IChoose (CTG) happy to answer questions, and happier to guide and develop the GOEF framework if you think you would find it useful. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Joanne S. Luciano, PhD Tetherless World Constellation Research Associate Professor Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Deputy Director, Web Science Research Center 110 8th Street, Winslow 2143 Office Tel. +1.518.276.4939 Global Tel. +1.617.440.4364 (skypeIn) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ _________________________________________________________________ Msg Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontology-summit/ Subscribe/Config: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontology-summit/ Unsubscribe: mailto:ontology-summit-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxCommunity Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/OntologySummit2013/Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2013 Community Portal: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
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