Business capabilities, skills & actors

[mjtapp]

Hi,

I have a situation where I'd like to capture information related to the specific skills an Actor has associated with them (personally). e.g. John Smith has skills with Java 1.6 SE.

When I look at the Business metamodel at the conceptual level, Business Capabilities are defined and then related to Business Roles which are in turn filled by Actors. This allows us to define the capabilities a business role is expected to provide, but it doesn't tell us what skills an Actor can provide.

What I want to be able to describe a list of skills and then describe these for specific Actors, I don't see a way of achieving this in the model at the moment. I could create more detailed Business Capabilities and then link them to Actors, but this breaks the Conceptual/Logical/Physical partitioning of the model and seems like it is turning Business Capabilities into something they are not meant to be (I think).

What I was wondering is whether this type of information appropriate to be kept in this model? And if so, what the best way of modeling this would be? I can't see a way of capturing what I need in the current meta-model so I'm thinking it'd need to be expanded to suit what I'm looking for.

Of the top of my head, it seems to me that at the Logical level I could create a Business Skill class that then links to an Actor at the Physical level and up to a Business Capability at the Conceptual level. I think this would achieve the effect I'm looking for, but it'd be good to know any general thoughts on this approach (or others) and the validity of holding this type of information here in general.

Thanks

Michael

[jonathan.carter]

Thanks very much for this, Michael. Very interesting - and certainly makes sense to be captured in the model.

I agree that trying to use Business Capability for this is stretching the semantics of that meta class too much. It's very important that each class has clear semantics. The Capabilities are intended to be used to capture WHAT the business does or needs to do. These are realised by the Processes and it feels like the skills are a different dimension.

If I understand your requirement correctly, we want to be able to define the skills that are required to perform a particular Business Role. Also, to capture the skills that a particular Actor (Group or Individual) has. Then we can use this information about the skills to make decisions on whether an Actor is actually able to perform a Business Role.

In this case, we can create relationships from Business Role and Actor to instances of the new Skill class. At this level, I think we want to be specific about the actual skills - even at the Logical, Business Role level. We can then report very easily on any skills mis-matches that might exist.
I'm trying to decide on where the Skills lives in the Business Layer. Feels like the logical view. We might also want to be able to 'semantically ground' these skills with a conceptual level skill. i.e. determine what TYPE of skills Java 1.6 SE is. Is this a development skill or a system admin skill. Doing so opens up some further reporting possibilities. Perhaps these Skill Type classes relate to Business Capabilities to let us define the types of skills that we will need to have in order to realise the capability. Again, more good reporting opportunities on skill gaps etc.

I would really appreciate your thoughts on this and we can quickly put together an extension pack to provide this capability for you.

I think the best way forward is to use our Community Process (ECP) and I will kick off ECP-5 to take this forward. ECP-5 now has it's own forum topic that we can use to discuss and develop this idea. I've taken these thought across to it. Please post back in that ECP-5 topic.

Thanks again for this suggestion.

Jonathan

[mjtapp]

Thanks Jonathan,

You have indeed understood my requirement and your thoughts are exactly the sort of thing I was grappling with. I'll post into the ECP-5 topic with further comments.

Michael