From Capabilities to Services: Modelling for business-IT alignment Service-orientation is still a surprisingly hard and complex endeavour after all these years and the risk of getting it wrong, potentially ending up with a distributed monolith with its devastating coupling, fragility, and cognitive nightmare, is still very real to many. Our industry is fairly immature and moves so fast that internalising acquired knowledge seems difficult and we often go through cycles of re-discovery of findings made decades ago. Maybe some SOA practitioners from the previous attempts made some breakthroughs that we have missed as we now have another go with microservices?
The concept of business capabilities from business architecture can be one approach to take a closer look at, with its holistic outside-in perspective of the company. The capability vantage point inherently abstracts away the 'what' a company does from the 'how' , describing the essence of what the business offers. In this talk we will take a closer look at what they are and what they can help us with, all the way from business strategies and analysis, via organisational design to data management and technical design. They may just be the tool we need to design services, micro or not, holistically in a business aligned sociotechnical system, where people, information, processes, and technology defined by the business capability they supports.
