(Cap-) ability based planning is an emerging discipline within the enterprise architecture domain. With strong influences from military frameworks and competence based management, a focus on abilities offers a complement to traditional enterprise modeling approaches and a possibility to represent organizational knowledge from a result based perspective. Unfortunately, contemporary frameworks and practices provide varying and overlapping definitions and applications of the concept of ability thus creating problems for practitioners with experiences from strategic planning, architecture and enterprise modeling disciplines. This paper presents a research effort and research in progress aiming at designing and developing an artifact, that enables description of and reasoning about an organizations or systems abilities. The developed artifact, an ability framework, includes a conceptual model. In subsequent work we plan to add a viewpoint, and method components. The artifact is designed to complement and integrate with existing and established concepts and offers a unique analytical tool for theoretical (comparative) analysis of ability based approaches that span across multiple fields of application and knowledge.
Capability is a long-established term and concept that has found its way to be used to describe organisations. It provides the basis for a genre of analysis, design and planning methods used in sev ...