Capability First

Gartner describes business capability modelling as “a technique for the representation of an organization’s business anchor model, independent of the organization’s structure, processes, people or domains”

A capability is therefore the combination of people, tools (technology), process and data required to achieve something necessary for the operation of the organisation.

It is a highly visual and effective tool but often overlooked.

We cannot be customer centric if we do not have the capability to support those goals nor can we affect seamless end to end processes if a capability is sub optimal.

The above illustration is an abstraction of some capabilities that might be seen in any public sector organisation with a responsibility for asset management. To outline some of the benefits of business capability modelling I have notionally assessed a few capabilities.

These invented assessments of the capabilities are:

·      Compliance reporting to the board is below average, the process for raising issues to board level is manual and cumbersome

·      The call centre capability is average but suffering from some tired legacy systems

·      Social media is assessed below average as content can be readily delivered but is missing the people or capacity to create it

·      Whilst the external facing website is great the intranet hasn’t kept pace with latest working practices

·      Effort in stakeholder engagement has stalled and the need in this space is unclear

·      Condition assessment is poor, work is getting done and services delivered but the data to make informed long-term decisions is missing or inaccurate

In this situation we might infer that:

Compliance is a process issue and unlikely to be a priority until something critical is missed.

The call centre is largely a technology issue that surfaces mostly in times of peak volumes. Similarly, the intranet is mainly a technology challenge. The customer service and communications managers may need to battle it out for some money in the next IT budget.

Social content is a people issue and probably sits in human resources as business as usual.

Community engagement is a more complex challenge across people, process, technology and data

Condition assessment is mostly a data challenge.

The capability model can be extremely useful:

We can say no (or not now) to any time, effort or dollars on the website no matter how good a sales pitch is received – its good enough

We can focus our risk and compliance people on improving the process before buying a new / additional solution

We can prioritise our IT expenditure between the call centre and intranet based on our strategic and tactical needs

We can see that the stakeholder engagement challenge is complex and modify our approach to use novel or emergent techniques

We can recognise that the complicated nature of asset data isn’t going away and may need some expert analysis

We can accept the challenges holistically without blaming people, systems or structure and present a roadmap for moving forward.

A capability approach may therefore mitigate the need for a giant process re-engineering project, in depth analysis of enterprise architecture that will be rapidly out of date or an organisational re-structure that shifts people around without addressing the underlying capability issue. It is by nature an interactive and agile process.

So, whilst it may be interesting to attempt to solve the call centre challenge using digital humans or expect asset data to be improved by the internet of things. Do capability first

Some further thoughts

The capability model (at any level of sophistication) observes and orients the current state “as is”. It allows us to take decisions and action earlier and avoids the paralysis of analysis or a linear time-consuming approach. It allows an iterative process similar to Boyds #OODA loop.

A capability that is weak across people, process, technology and data is more likely to need complexity thinking rather than a pure technical issue that needs linear expert analysis. It may indicate where #cynefin or #sensemaking is best applied

It is grounded in the present, it allows us to #breakthecycleofmadness. We need to get out of the woods to find the road to get to our destination.

It informs the #requisteminds #teamscience needed to address the challenge (getting the right people in the room) and by reframing the question as improving a capability from implementing a solution may lead better outcomes.