Organizational Capabilities in Less than 100 Words

How quick can your organization respond to its constituents needs. How effective can it adapt to changing dynamics in the environment surrounding it? How efficient can it deliver its mission? The answer to these questions depends on what we call organizational capabilities.

Similar to an individual's ability, organizations have abilities to do certain things, these abilities combined with resources, assets, processes and skills form an organizational capability. A few examples of strategic capabilities are (1) The ability to innovate and be creative, (2) the ability to develop and deploy products in a compressed cycle, and (3) the ability to educate and train young people.

Are your capabilities well defined? Do you know how to improve them, and how to measure where these capabilities are enabling your stakeholders to realize the value proposition you are offering?

Know Thy Business Events

A business event is a valuable building block in an enterprise's business architecture. Business events provide insights to triggers and decision points in the business domain. Business events could be classified into three types: External events such as a customer service request, internal events such as closing a project or an employee time sheet submission, and finally temporal events which occur based on the elapse of a given time-frame such as end of month.

There are many important questions to ask oneself about events when building a business architecture or when defining events. Examples are:

1. How are these events identified?
2. Are they unique?
3. Can they be repeatable?
4. How can we structure events in the context of a business architecture?
5. How can events be modular?
6. What processes are related to events?
7. What business capabilities are impacted by events?
8. What impact does the event have on the business services, operations and other areas?
9. Who reacts (which roles) to an event and in what way?
10. How often does an event occur and what is its significance?