The Essential Project Forum

Hi

The metamodel in version 4.0.1 has business_capabilities, application_capabilities and technology_capabilities

Just wondering why an Information_Capability class does not exist.

melbpar1 wrote:Hi

The metamodel in version 4.0.1 has business_capabilities, application_capabilities and technology_capabilities

Just wondering why an Information_Capability class does not exist.

Great question.

Really the Information Concept provides the Information Layer equivalent of Business Capabilities, Technology Capabilities etc. We made the choice of going with a name for the class that is probably a bit more familiar for Information / Data Architects than Information Capability or Data Capability and went with Information Concept and Data Subject.

These give the 'WHAT' in the Information and Data layer in the same way that Business Capabilities give us the 'WHAT' about what the business does / needs to do.

Or have we missed something? What sort of thing did you have in mind for the Information Capability?

Many of the things that you might 'do' with information and data end up being business processes, application providers, technology products etc.
However, it would be great to hear more about your thoughts on this

Jonathan

Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for your response. We are currently using the Information Concept and Data Subject to hold classification of conceptual terms normally used by the business and subject areas in our Enterprise Data Model respectively.
What I mean by information capability is those area of capability required by an organization to manage its information & data. This would include capabilities such as Common Business Language Management, Reference Data Management, Data Profiling, Information Retention & Destruction, Information Security Management, etc.
Having information capabilities.
Please let me know what you think. Is it worth maintaining a separate Information Capability Model or should all these type of capabilities be dealt with as processes?

Thanks

Great points.

These are actually Business Capabilities as ultimately, you would define and use business processes to perform these activities.

In terms of being able to group these together (so that we don't lose them amongst the other business capabilities), we can map them to the IT Business Domain or even use a sub-domain within there about Information Architecture. And maybe these Information Architecture capabilities are not 'IT' as such, then we don't have to have this under the IT domain.

It's interesting that most businesses seem not to model the 'IT' (for want of a better phrase) capabilities and processes, most of which have their own supporting applications etc.! Rather they focus on the main things that the business does.

I think that rather than create a separate Information Capability Model, it's better to manage these within the overall business capability model but it certainly makes sense to use the Business Domain or even a Taxonomy term to group define this 'subset'.
Managing these like this means that we can then take advantage of all the relationships, meta model constructs and views that are available for business capabilities.

One thing we have drawn out for the Information perspective is the 'WHY', which is at least partly defined in terms of the Information Architecture Drivers, Information Architecture Objectives and Information Architecture Principles that we've got in the Information Conceptual section of the meta model. However, we should be able to relate these to and from the business capabilities for these Information Architecture business capabilities.

Jonathan


Jonathan