On the Capability Notion in Business Informatics

The business environments of today are changing rapidly, entailing complex and dynamic organizational constellations. Enterprises operating in these conditions need to have the capability to deliver their services in a variety of business contexts with sustainable quality and moreover to leverage them to competitive advantage. Lately the notion of capability has gained a growing attention, due to a number of factors: the notion directs business investment focus, it can be used as a baseline for business planning, and it leads directly to service specification and design. Linguistically, capability means having power of doing something. Historically, the notion of capability has been examined in Economics [1], Sociology [2, 3], and Management Science [4, 5, 6]. Capability is seen as originating from competence-based management and military frameworks, offering a complement to traditional enterprise modelling approaches by representing organizational knowledge from a result-based perspective. Thus it is as an abstraction away from the specifics of how (process), who (agent) and why (goals), i.e. with focus on results and benefits. More recently, capability is gaining more attention in the context of business-I