VDML for Business Architects: Part 4 of 11, Capability Modeling

Please see the post for VDML for Business Architects: Part 1 of 11, for the introduction to this series of posts.  This part focuses on business capabilities and their application to accomplish required work.  A capability is the ability to perform the type of work to deliver desired results.  It includes personnel with required skills, facilities, access to resources and the intellectual capital for reliable and efficient capability application.
1.    Capability applied by individuals and/or collaborations

A capability method is a combination of collaboration and capability that specifies the application of a capability including the activities performed by individuals or delegated to organization units that apply other, supporting capability methods.

2.    Capability delegation network

Delegations from a capability method to other capability methods form a delegation tree that may be modeled without the detail of activities that engage the delegated capability methods.  Value contributions of capability methods (or other collaborations) can be manually specified without activity network details.  The delegation tree is not only important for specification of shared services, but it supports refinement of the scope of capabilities and it provides the basis for assignment of capability resources and responsibilities to organization units.

3.    Capability methods as building blocks

Capability Methods can represent sharable services in a service-oriented architecture.  This supports capability methods as shared components for configuration of new business models that leverage existing capabilities.  It also achieves economies of scale in the development of methods and personnel as well as utilization of resources and adaptation to changing business requirements.

4.    Capability library links to capability implementers, providers and applications

The capability library is a taxonomy of all capabilities of the enterprise.  These have links to the organization units that have implementation and/or application responsibility and the activities that engage capability method(s) that deliver the capability in different value streams and lines of business.  The taxonomy is a classification hierarchy.  This is not the same as a delegation tree that depicts levels of engagement of capability methods.

5.    Selective expansion of capability delegation

Capability method delegations form a tree of capability methods.  These delegation trees with activity networks may be selectively expanded as appropriate to the level of delegation necessary for the accuracy required by the purpose of the model.  An un-expanded capability method can provide an estimated summary of value contributions of the un-expanded branch of the delegation tree.