An Integrative Approach to Developing Organisational Capabilities and Individual Skills

The tightly coupled relationship between organisational capability and the skills and competences of the individuals working in that organisation has long been recognised in both the academic literature and by the practitioner community. Simply improving individuals’ skills and hoping that the organisation’s capability automatically improves in tandem is not sufficient, however. This relationship is non-trivial and needs to be actively managed, meaning that people need to have shared goals and not just fragmented learning (Kim, 1993).Prior knowledge and skills at the individual and collective level form the basis for developing capabilities in an organisation (Nieves & Haller, 2014). An organisation’s capabilities, therefore, lie primarily in the organising principles by which individuals’ and functional expertise is structured, coordinated, and communicated (Zander & Kogut, 1995). This requires deliberate intervention by the organisation’s management to enable or drive individual learning to improve organisational capabilities and therefore organisational performance (Vargas, Lloria, & Roig-Dobón, 2016). This brings our focus to organisational learning, which is defined as “increasing an organization’s capacity to take effective action” (Kim, 1993, p. 43), rather than perpetuating a fragmented learning approach.Feedback from users of the Innovation Value Institute’s (IVI) IT-Capability Maturity Framework(IT-CMF)has indicated that while the capability improvement tools provide a roadmap of what needs to be done, there is a gap in terms of how to go about enabling that. Similarly, users of the Skills Framework for the Information Age(SFIA) indicate that it is useful for identifying skills gaps and training requirements,but is less helpful at demonstrating how the organisation has improved following a skills-based intervention. Stakeholders involved with EU initiatives around the development of an ICT Profession have also confirmed the importance of the relationship between individual skills and organisational capability. The lack of a unified approach to this issue of organisational learningthat they identify further corroborates the difficulties in simultaneously addressing organisational capability and individual skills development,Based on this recognised need to address individual skills and organisational capability development in a holistic way, the IVI and the SFIA Foundation have been collaborating to link the capability improving IT-CMF with the skills improving SFIA framework. This was achieved through further collaboration with the British Computer Society (BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT), using their SFIAplusWork Activities as the mechanism through which SFIA and IT-CMF could be connected at a comparable level of alignment between Skills and Capabilities