=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1182/introduction
|storemode=property
|title=On the Capability Notion in Business Informatics
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1182/cobi_intro.pdf
|volume=Vol-1182
}}
==On the Capability Notion in Business Informatics==
<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1182/cobi_intro.pdf</pdf>
<pre>
      On the Capability Notion in Business Informatics

                 Jelena Zdravkovic1, Oscar Pastor2, Peri Loucopouls3
      1
        Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Sweden
                                 jelenaz@dsv.su.se
      2
        PROS Center, Universitat Politèchnica de València, Camino de Vera S/N, Spain
                                opastor@dsic.upv.es
               3
                 Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, U.K.
                       pericles.loucopoulos@mbs.ac.uk

The business environments of today are changing rapidly, entailing complex and
dynamic organizational constellations. Enterprises operating in these conditions need
to have the capability to deliver their services in a variety of business contexts with
sustainable quality and moreover to leverage them to competitive advantage. Lately
the notion of capability has gained a growing attention, due to a number of factors:
the notion directs business investment focus, it can be used as a baseline for business
planning, and it leads directly to service specification and design.
  Linguistically, capability means having power of doing something. Historically, the
notion of capability has been examined in Economics [1], Sociology [2, 3], and
Management Science [4, 5, 6]. Capability is seen as originating from competence-
based management and military frameworks, offering a complement to traditional
enterprise modelling approaches by representing organizational knowledge from a
result-based perspective. Thus it is as an abstraction away from the specifics of how
(process), who (agent) and why (goals), i.e. with focus on results and benefits.
  More recently, capability is gaining more attention in the context of business-IT
alignment. In the specification and design of services using business planning as the
baseline [7], capability is seen as the fundamental abstraction to describe what a core
business does in the sense of the capacity to achieve a desired outcome. It is viewed
as a hierarchy, where each level is a decomposition of one or more capabilities at a
higher level. Capabilities are further mapped to solutions, such as IT applications.
Similarly, in [8, 9], capability is seen as an ability or capacity for a company to
deliver value, either to customers or shareholders, right beneath the business strategy.
At the same time capability should allow fairly straightforward integrations with
established enterprise model components, such as goals (through “goal fulfilment”),
processes (through “modelling”), and services (through “servicing”). The latter
relation, specific to service-oriented engineering has been described in Service
Oriented Architecture [10], i.e. a capability is seen as existing business functionality
able to address a well-defined need implemented through a service accessible through
an interface. In addition to the outlined related concepts, in [11], capability is set
closely to the notion of business context to enable an enterprise to achieve business
goals in varying and dynamically changing environments.
  However, the knowledge, role and the usage of enterprise capabilities in the named
disciplines in terms of people competencies and the capacity of the resources, are still
unclear and open to different interpretations. How to utilize “capability” knowledge in
 2


 enterprise modelling and architectures as a foundation for sustainable Information
 System planning and management in the presence of varying social and business
 contexts is likely to yield substantial results in both research and practice in years to
 come. In the meantime, we endeavour to address the concerns of solving the relation
 between capability and services, capability-driven methods in business process
 engineering, capability and variability, capability-driven cloud applications, and
 technology support for capability-based tools, to name just a few.


 References
 1. Sen, A. Development as freedom. Oxford University Press (1999)
 2. Deneulin, S., The capability approach and the praxis of development. Palgrave (2006)
 3. Deneulin, S. and Shahani, L., eds. An introduction to the human development and
    capability approach. Earthscan (2009)
 4. Teece, D.J., Pisano, G., and Shuen, A. Dynamic capabilities and strategic management.
    Strategic Management Journal. 18, 7 509-533 (1997)
 5. Colis, J. How valuable are organizational capabilities? Strategic Management Journal. 15,
    Special issue on 'Competitive Organizational Behavior' 143-152 (1994)
 6. Bhatt, G.D. and Grover, V. Types of information technology capabilities and their role in
    competitive advantage: An empirical study. Journal of Management Information Systems.
    22, 2 253-277 (2005)
 7. Ulrich, W. and Rosen, M. The business capability map: Building a foundation for
    business/it alignment. Cutter Consortium for Business and Enterprise Architecture (2012)
 8. OPENGROUP (2012) TOGAF - enterprise architecture methodology, version 9.1,
    http://www.opengroup.org/togaf/
 9. OPENGROUP (2012) Archimate - modelling language for enterprise architecture, v2.0,
    https://www2.opengroup.org/ogsys/catalog/c118
10. OASIS (2011) Reference architecture foundation for service oriented architecture version
    1.0.
11. EU FP7 Caas Project. Capability as a service for digital enterprises. http://caas-project.eu/

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