“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated”, by Confucius.
A recent flurry of articles and posts reminded me of how complicated simple ideas can be. This simple quote captures the state of the beautifully convoluted worlds of capability, process and service based analysis and planning.
On the other hand, It is not surprising that these discussions consume a large bandwidth since organisations, strategies, and businesses have existed long before ideas such as capability become fashionable. ‘New kids on the block’ are the talk of the town until people can understand, accept and work with them.
It is easy to find discussions that go around and around and around with no end in sight. People argue for their ways of thinking and doing that fit their practice. The nature of discussions is often advocacy (to influence) and not inquiry (to understand). In many cases, experts claim their ways and practices are the right ways and the others are wrong and don’t understand. Not very inspirational, motivational or productive! Many of the convoluted debates seem to be persistent in the fields of business architecture, enterprise (IS/IT) architecture, service architecture, and information modelling.
In a series of articles, I intend to look behind the discussions and explore what is similar and different regarding the ideas of capability, process, and service. The approach I’m taking is human centric, work oriented, and instrumental. A use of capability, process, and service ideas and analysis techniques must be worthwhile to people in work they do with others.
I’m not going to fall into the trap of claiming others are wrong. I’m not going propose a new specific approach that competes with everyone else's. Instead, I’m aiming at providing you with insights and reasoning tools so you can create your own approach or practice, or evaluate and adapt others.