Just a few further thoughts on capability modelling:
Capability modelling came of out of strategic planning as a theory for how to direct investment. It encourages a portfolio perspective, and so the “units” it deals with are “potential objects of funding”, but this perspective, in my opinion presupposes a prior business architecture encoded in a function model and a business model.
A roadmap would then define how the organisation gets from where it is to where it want to be, through a series of steps which entail specific investment decisions – which the capability model is designed to identify. The driver though is needing to fulfil some necessary business function to some predefined standard of performance. Capabilities are really the architectural answer to this business oriented question.
If I have :
- a function ( travelling, moving about, method-as-yet unsecified )
- a task to be accomplished ( say getting to work, somehow, method-as-yet unspecified )
- a performance standard ( by 9am every morning )
then a capability model would tell me how I COULD accomplish this.
Here are a number of possibilities, each of which would BE a capability
- With a pair of sneakers and a street directory, I could walk to work
- With an opal card and a timetable I could use public transport
- With a bicycle or a car and a GPS I could make my own way to work
- With a credit card ,I could catch an UBER or taxi or even a helicopter
- I could step into my own personal teleporter and arrive instantly.
some of these are low tech, some enlist either public infrastructure or private operators. Some are not technically possible, but all are possible entries in a capability model, and all could be linked with the original requirement of getting to work by 9am.
Capabilities are, in a sense, functionally underspecified, because they don’t tell you what you want to do, only what you would need to do what you want to do.
Their role amongst the suite of models vying for attention is still in my mind an open question. They seem to me to be an answer not a question, so they do not help you ask the question, they help you understand someone else’s answer.