Home > Store > Information Technology
Capability Cases: A Solution Envisioning Approach
- By Irene Polikoff, Robert Coyne, Ralph Hodgson
- Published Jul 26, 2005 by Addison-Wesley Professional.
- Copyright 2006
- Dimensions: 7x9-1/4
- Pages: 504
- Edition: 1st
- Book
- ISBN-10: 0-321-20576-6
- ISBN-13: 978-0-321-20576-6
Register your product to gain access to bonus material or receive a coupon.
"In this innovative book, Irene Polikoff, Robert Coyne, and Ralph Hodgson have captured deep insights from many years of studying how to get across the 'Business-IT Gap.' Capability Cases are an invaluable tool for bridging from envisioning to design."
—Steve Cook, software architect, Microsoft Corporation
"Capability Cases offers hope that mere mortals can rise above the daunting challenge of blending technology and process. Executives hoping to adopt high-performing business models will want to learn this step-by-step approach to designing and implementing IT-enabled organizational change."
—Dr. Jeanne W. Ross, principal research scientist, MIT Center for Information
BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN BUSINESS VISION AND SOFTWARE SOLUTIONBoth IT organizations and business leaders recognize the urgent importance of aligning technology solutions with enterprise strategy. But they've struggled to do so... until now. Capability Cases represents a breakthrough: a powerful, systematic way to translate business vision into effective plans and system designs.
The authors' Solution Envisioning methodology addresses the crucial "front end" of software development, where you decide what to build and how you're going to build it. Using realistic examples, they walk you through exploring the capabilities you need, capturing business best practices, identifying optimal solutions, and crafting software systems that deliver them.
Solution Envisioning enables you to specify better solutions in less time, build systems that more fully reflect your true needs, and dramatically reduce risk and cost throughout the entire development process. Understand Solution Envisioning—from vision to plan—in three phases:
Use Business Capability Exploration (BCE) to build a shared understanding of what is needed in a solution—model your business situation using business forces, desired results, metrics, and scenarios
Run Solution Capability Envisioning (SCE) workshops to facilitate decision-making, collaborative assessment, and consolidation of a solution concept—use Capability Case Galleries to discover alternatives, gain context, promote stakeholder interaction, and stimulate creativity
Move from concept to business case to a roadmap for realization with Software Capability Design (SCD)
Includes easy-to-use "best of class" templates for developing a business case, concept of operations, architectural decisions, and other key work products.
Whether you're an executive, architect, project manager, developer, change agent, or consultant, Capability Cases will help you bridge the gap between vision and solution—so you can finally get what you need from information technology.
© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.
Online Sample Chapter
Introduction to Capability Cases
Preface
Capability.1 It's a promising word. It sounds, well, capable, and it alludes to the delivery of something. We all use capabilities every day in the goods and services by which we construct our lives. We like to be capable; we respect and value capabilities in others. As individuals, we carefully evaluate and compare the capabilities in the products and services we purchase—in everything from cars and houses to palm pilots, digital cameras, and mobile phone services. We look for and expect capabilities in companies we choose to deal with and in the companies we own or choose to be a part of.
As businesses, we also need to purchase or build, deploy and use, offer or consume capabilities all the time—regularly and continuously. It is requisite that we absorb, embrace, employ, and evolve new capabilities—with ever greater speed and agility—simply to remain effective and cost competitive. But, knowing about and successfully deploying the right new capabilities has always been challenging to businesses. In particular, software and technology capabilities are sometimes as elusive, amorphous, and difficult to pin down as they are valuable and essential to the core operations and processes of most modern businesses and organizations.
Most business capabilities today are a combination of human capital, fixed assets (such as facilities), processes, and technology. Forging successful combinations requires proficient orchestration of the interplay between business and technology. In this era of technology explosion (ranging from Web Services to new Platforms for Collaboration and Personalization to Semantic Technologies and Agents), the possibilities are as truly mind- boggling as the challenges of effective action. In nearly every industry and business area, technology capabilities are playing an ever more prominent role—and some business capabilities are becoming identical with technology capabilities.
We are entering a world where the network is the platform and a large amount of business-enabling capabilities will be made possible by assembling commodity software that implements standardized protocols. Indeed, technologies are creating deeper changes in businesses—invoking a disruptive new order that challenges all the rules of business. Business capabilities made possible by technology demolish traditional barriers of geography, law, organization, and time while simultaneously raising new bars for success in terms of connectedness, convenience, quality, and performance.2
For instance, capabilities introduced by technology have changed user expectations. Business has become more personal, and customers have (much) more control. Businesses have rapidly become more connected and accessible, and in many cases instantly available all the time. As a result, business has paradoxically become both simpler and more complex. Technologies can simplify transactions, but they also engender more complex transactions and more sophisticated use of data and knowledge. New capabilities create challenges to business models by regularly shifting the value proposition. Many things that were previously sold are given away for free. Business value, to be earned by truly serving customers, has shifted to somewhere else in the value chain.
How hard it is to identify, design, and deploy the right capabilities? Capability, per se, doesn't usually conjure up any nuances or overtones of failure (yet). But, as we all know, as soon as we attempt to acquire and make use of capabilities, there is suddenly a pressing demand for a blend of vision, planning, and know-how to take advantage of and make capabilities actual or realized through their successful application. Further complicating the situation, there is an increasing multiplicity of sources from which to realize (develop, acquire, compose) capabilities. Geoffrey Moore, industry consultant and best-selling author, puts it this way:3
"With service-oriented architecture, integration, composition of applications, open source software, vendor consolidation and the tension between building, buying and outsourcing software solutions—companies are under pressure to change too much and too fast. Risks seem unavoidable. There is not enough budget or time to cover all the bases. The leading enterprises will identify the core of their business and invest in safety and agility of the IT behind this core—first."
Unless we have knowledge of capabilities, the vision to know their worth, and the experience and discipline to apply them, we may get lost somewhere in a "sea of potentials." In our personal lives, in assessing where true capabilities are found, whether they are real, sound, and worth having, we typically use many sources of information, processes, and tools for evaluation—facilities such as Consumer Reports4 for consumer products or recommendations from friends or people who have experience with the capability. This book is an attempt to aid individuals and companies in improving technology-enabled business capabilities by responding to their needs for
Understanding what capabilities exist—what is out there
Facilitating the interplay between business and technical ideas
Understanding the significance and implications of capabilities and the constraints and costs of employing them
Establishing effective processes for acquiring, adopting, and -applying capabilities
We introduce the Solution Envisioning process to help people envision together the needs and possibilities of business. The process is supported by the Capability Case, an aid to understanding and evaluating capabilities. In the everyday sense of the words, the Capability Case is intended to build a case for a capability by illustrating its potential and value. We offer Solution Envisioning with Capability Cases (the approach this book introduces) as a start toward a new kind of essential, comprehensive approach for appreciating and making intelligent decisions about the available technology capabilities that will be powering businesses for some time to come.
1 The quality of being capable; capacity or ability needed to do something. (plural) Qualities that may be used or developed; potentialities.
2 We are indebted to Peter Stecher of IBM, EMEA, for insights into this characterization of the revolutionary nature of new technologies in terms of the deeper changes they bring to doing business.
3 From Gartner Application Integration & Web Services Summit 2005 brochure, highlighting Moore's keynote talk, "The Key to Sustained Leadership: Separating the Core from the Context," where he "shares his latest insights into the software industry challenges and opportunities."
4 A source that has its own 'capabilities'—a trusted source of information, knowledge, evaluative mechanisms, and the experience to make useful judgments about the relative promise and value of other capabilities.