You might perhaps describe this piece as “praising with faint damns” – but oh, it’s so nice to be able to say something nice for once about The Open Group! Okay, yeah, maybe a bit unkind to start this that …

Open Group on business-capabilities – a quick review Read more »

Ah definitions, definitions – so many to choose from! But somehow, only a limited number of labels to go around, to share out amongst all those definitions? Which means that people end up using the same labels for different things, …

Why service, function and capability Read more »

One of the themes that came up in the Vlerick Business School session on EA-roadmaps was around how long it takes to learn how to develop the skills needed to do enterprise-architecture – and how and why to learn them, …

Learning and the limits of automation Read more »

All that discussion about capabilities – yeah, great, fine. But how do we use them? How do we use this notion of ‘capabilities’ in designing our business-models and suchlike? I was kinda reminded about this from another direction yesterday, in a great …

Putting capabilities to use Read more »

This one’s really straightforward: it’s just a follow-up to a public request on Twitter by Bizzdesign consultant Bas van Gils: basvg: I am looking for definitions of these concepts, please help: capability, capability based planning, capability increment, capability map I’ve …

Definitions on capability Read more »

What can our business-capabilities do? As our business-needs and business-context change, what options do we have to re-purpose and re-use those capabilities? These questions came up for me from a brief yet excellent LinkedIn thread on affordances. To me that thread …

Function, capability and affordance Read more »

How can we clarify the confusion over service, capability and function in enterprise-architecture models? Andrew Marosy made a comment to my previous post on this that really needs to be brought out here in full: You can also visualise a …

Service, function and capability (an addendum) Read more »

How can we distinguish between service, capability and function in enterprise-architecture models? This is one of those perennial questions that keeps returning time and time again, and it’s one of the key confusions that Enterprise Canvas aims to resolve. But …

Service, function and capability (again) Read more »

In enterprise-architecture, how do we disentangle business-function, business-capability and business-service? This one’s for Adam Johnson, particularly as a follow-on to his comment to the previous post ‘More on EA and asset-types [Part 4]‘: I perceived your usage of function to …

On function, capability and service Read more »

What are the different types of assets that we need to deal with in an enterprise-architecture? What implications arise across the architecture from the differences between these types? In the first post in this series, we identified four distinct asset-dimensions: physical: physical …

More on EA and asset-types [4] Read more »