What are capabilities?

A capability describes WHAT a business needs to be able to do. It describes what information is needed to perform this and what information is to be created. A capability can have a process that describes how the work is done to refine information and create results. An ability has a relationship to role and/or organization to describe who handles the ability and what competence is needed. There are different examples of how they are expressed grammatically depending on who you ask. As a verb, Make products, or noun Product manufacturing.

Since in process modeling we use verbs in infinitive form for processes, we prefer to keep the name for capabilities as a noun.

Capabilities are divided, just like processes, according to core, management and support capabilities.

Purpose of capability modeling

Capability modeling emerged as a way to create a common perspective for collaboration between operations and IT. Where the business talks about productivity, value chains and quality, IT talks about functions, security and access. It is no wonder that conceptual confusion arises and that communication can sometimes lead to misunderstandings.

However, it must be clarified that capabilities should in no way be an IT perspective but an operational perspective. Even if some capablities are automated, IT must still be seen as a support for realizing the capablities. After all, IT is there to support the creation of value within the business.

How does capability modeling add anything more than process models in 2c8?

In process models, much of what is described in a capability model can be collected, for example, roles, systems and needs. However, processes are at a lower level and do not provide the same overall picture that the capabiliy models intend to describe.

A characteristic of capablities and capability models is that they are more stable over time than, for example, organization and processes. An capability can also be realized through several similar processes.

Here we could have an example. The Invoicing capability can be done through three different processes, Create and send an invoice manually, Create your own invoice, Invoicing through the portal. One can disappear or a fourth can be added without the business changing the capablity.

Capability modeling in 2c8 Apps

The following describes how capability models work in 2c8 Apps.

The structure of the capability models

Capabilities are described as their own symbol and in their own model type, Capability Model. Unlike other models, the decomposed object forms a frame instead of being placed as an object in the upper left corner. The frame has predefined relationships to objects placed in the frame.

Capabilities can consist of other capabilities just as a process can be broken down into sub-processes. The difference is that capabilities are not connected to business objects in a value chain.

Relations and objects

In addition to the new object type ability, a new relationship type is also added.

Realizes / Realized by: This relationship describes how a process realizes a capability or that a capability is realized by one or more processes.

As we previously described, there are pre-selected relationships in the capability object's frame when the capability object is broken down into a capability model.

These include the relationships according to the image and its direction.