In this fast-paced world, enterprises are facing increasing difficulties to sustain competitive advantage. The dynamic capability view (DCV) in strategic management suggests that the ability to continuously create valuable and rare capabilities is the basis for competitiveness in rapidly changing environments. Flexible information technology (IT) capabilities that are aligned to enterprise capabilities and which can facilitate agile operation and decision making play a fundamental role in dynamic capabilities. In this paper we outline a vision of architecting enterprise capabilities building upon the i* modeling framework to facilitate design of more flexible and adaptive IT capabilities. We discuss how the proposed modeling framework facilitates reasoning on capability development, orchestration and deployment alternatives considering nonfunctional requirements with flexibility as a fundamental concern.
The notion of capability is introduced in the strategic management literature to
identify strengths and weaknesses of an organization and their influence on
competitive advantage. The Dynamic Capability View (DCV) is a theoretical view within the
Resource Based Theory (RBT) that focuses on the dynamic nature of resources and
capabilities in strategic management. It argues that the ability to continuously create
valuable, rare and difficult to replicate capabilities are the bases for competitiveness
[
Information Systems (IS) and IT-enabled enterprise capabilities can play a strategic
role in business competitiveness [
Recognizing the socio-technical nature of enterprise capabilities, in this paper we
outline the potential of the i* modeling framework to reason on capability
alternatives. We propose extensions to the i* framework and discuss its ability to analyze
implications of capability alternatives on each other and the overall logic of value
creation. Research indicates that decentralizing capabilities will foster innovation and
allows architects to create advantage from the complementary nature of capabilities in
organizations [
Enterprise capabilities emerge from investment in a strategy that is realized
through collaboration of multiple stakeholders and uses resources, processes, skill
sets, and is shaped by its historical path and organizational culture [
Capability design and evolution consists of decision making regarding three sets of alternatives: (1) Capability Development which focuses on building, selecting and acquiring the right resources and processes to form capabilities. The choice to employ a centralized Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) with a service registry or use of a mash up portal with RESTful web services for implementation of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an example of development alternatives. The implications of each choice on required resources and skill sets and non-functional requirements are significantly different. (2) Capability Orchestration focuses on analyzing multiple sets of capabilities and their coordination strategies. For example how each of the SOA alternatives communicate with domain applications and integrate them to facilitate Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is an orchestration alternative. (3) Capability Deployment Configuration concentrates on configurations of capabilities at deployment time. For example, whether Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) should be developed and maintained by the SOA team or by developers of domain applications are two alternative deployment configurations. 3
The i* modeling framework facilitates socio-technical exploration of organizations
by graphical representation of actors, intensions, dependencies, responsibilities and
alternatives. Different actors and their associations express the social aspect of i*.
Tangible and intangible intentions of actors are represented by goals and softgoals.
The Strategic Dependency (SD) model of i* depicts actors dependencies on each
other to accomplish tasks, provision resources and satisfy goals and softgoals. More
detail reasoning and decomposition of actors intensions are provided in the Strategic
Rational (SR) model [
We use i* goal models to reason on capability development, orchestration and deployment configurations. In particular we propose modeling core capabilities of an enterprise as i* actors to embody their independence that is built over time. Capabilities modeled as specialized actors are indicated with intertwined circles added to the i* symbol for actor. In figure 1, we discuss a set of IT capabilities in a hypothetical case that are used to facilitate more efficient Enterprise Management. The Business Process Management (BPM) capability is part of the Enterprise Management and enables Business Process Operation with a certain Modifiability that facilitates Smooth transition and execution. The Business Intelligence provides data driven Insight with high degree of Reliability as part of the Enterprise Management to facilitate confident decision making. The SOA capability is provided by the IT Support Team to enable Application Integration with Flexibility in Resource Orchestration to facilitate Smooth and Modifiable BPM implementation. The BI capability also depends on the SOA implementation to gain Integrated Information Access.
A position, or, in the case of collaborating partners, multiple positions are responsible for a capability. Modeling positions relations and dependencies with capabilities will facilitate better understanding of the social context of capabilities within the organization and allows better decision making when architecting capabilities. As an example in figure 1 each of the three BPM, SOA and BI capabilities have different positions responsible for them and effective Enterprise Management requires their collaboration. Roles and agents in the organization can be part of the positions that are responsible for a capability and can be dependent or depend on capabilities. The Data Analyst as part of the Decision Maker presented in figure 1 is dependent on the BI capability to play a role in the organization (this dependency is not shown in the model to save space) and the BI capability is dependent on the Data Analyst to perform Analysis and Interpretation on the data to produce Insight.
Modeling capabilities as specialized i* actors will allow: (1) Reasoning on capability alternatives and their influence on each other. As an example in figure 1, we presented three development alternatives for BI implementation. The choice among these alternatives will influence the Data Accuracy and Consistency, and the Flexibility softgoal. The Enterprise Management’s reliance on the Data Accuracy and Consistency will prioritize alternatives that better satisfy the softgoal. This originates from the Consumer’s demand for High Quality Service. As depicted in figure 1, each of the alternatives will result in distinctive capability orchestrations and SD models (areas labeled Alternative 1, 2 and 3 in figure 1). (2) Expression of the social context of capabilities alongside their rationales facilitates analysis of their receptiveness or resistance to a certain alternative. For example, the Data Analyst will likely resist to the Data Warehouse alternative of BI implementation because of its hurtful contribution to the Flexibility softgoal. (3) Analysis of how architecting capabilities will affect enterprise competitiveness. The SD model will serve as a roadmap to understand the organizational value creation and facilitates the architect to analyze the consequences of changes on the value network. Each of the SOA alternatives presented in figure 1 will have different impacts on the Flexibility of Resource Orchestration which in turn can affect the Modifiability of BPM implementation. The SD model will serve as a roadmap for analyzing such relations and their impact on the organization’s Quality of Service offered to the Consumer. This analysis on flexibility and modifiability softgoals from multiple stakeholders’ viewpoints will facilitate a better understanding of the flexibility requirements of the enterprise architecture as a whole. 4
Capability models have been proposed in recent research to present investment
profiles, facilitate business-IT alignment, plan and map service-oriented
implementation, identify risks, and to make run-time adjustments to changing business context
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The quality of proposed analysis is highly dependent on identification of the
capabilities and the definition of their boundaries. This can be a potential limitation on
practical application of the approach. Few of the IS capability modeling approaches
have provided methodological support or criteria for identifying or evaluating
capabilities alternatives. The proposed evaluation criteria are limited to operational
performance or context dependent qualities and do not consider strategic competencies
[
In order to evaluate the contributions that IT capabilities make to organizational value creation and appropriation, two sets of analysis should be performed: (1) what capabilities and which stakeholders should be included in the capability model? In the case presented in figure 1, are the presented capabilities and their relations to stakeholders enough for making decisions? Does the modeled relation between the Consumer and Enterprise Management contain enough detail or is it oversimplified? Can one decide among SOA alternatives without considering other IT capabilities and operational requirements of the organization? Are all the stakeholders and capabilities that influence and use the BI and BPM capabilities represented in this model? The i* capability models allow asking and answering such questions in multiple iterations and depict the relations among capabilities and their beneficiaries. (2) The second set of analysis focuses on what to include or exclude when designing a capability. In the case example, should the organization merge the SOA and BPM capabilities or will the enterprise benefit from their separation? The second option allows the two capabilities to fall under the responsibilities of two different organizational stakeholders (modeled as i* positions in figure 1). The i* model expresses that if the organization is planning to implement Data Virtualization as part of the BI capability, it will benefit from reusing the SOA infrastructure. Therefore there is an opportunity to gain more efficiency by assigning the responsibility of managing and scaling the SOA capability to the IT Support Team.
The i* dependencies in capability models provide a basis for further analysis on the causes and propagation of inflexibilities and their influences on organizational value creation. Without a methodology and tool support, the task of analyzing the influences of dependencies on each other is difficult. The i* models need to be further extended to depict the constraints that limit dependencies and capability orchestration alternatives.