Capability Management
For those organizations that manage and exploit a portfolio of high-cost assets to deliver capability, a key requirement is confidence in the difficult decisions around continuing investment and effective use of resources. These decisions are made more challenging in a complex business environment in which many inter-related factors can affect future demand and risk.
One such organisation facing this challenge is the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD). In this case, the MoD is responsible for deploying a portfolio of military capabilities to deliver military effects to satisfy operational demands, in the face of an ever-changing threat. This is a significant challenge because the acquisition and management of military capability is complex, costly and time-consuming, and the demands of the front-line require a responsive and agile acquisition approach. Consequently, the MOD understands the need for effective capability management, through an environment that is able to manage the complexity of the options and implications, in support of a confident and rational decision process.
Equally, in many other sectors, making decisions to maximise business output based on myriad interconnected elements can be fraught with difficulty, balancing factors such as resources, risk, and effort. Furthermore, the ability to demonstrate the relative worth of disproportionate investments can be a serious challenge to decision makers.
Our approach is an architecture-driven environment to support informed capability management decisions. We bring together the processes and tools to enable “capability based trades” through an environment that delivers increased objectivity, a single view of the truth, and pace to enable rapid response to changing circumstances. The complexity of these trades demands a range of visualisations to inform relevant communities of users (finance, IT, market specialists) to enable them to make rapid iterations through the plethora of high level options before undertaking detailed analysis of likely candidates.
This approach means we consolidate diverse sources of information – architectural, programmatic, performance and commercial – and harness the technologies to provide a dynamic, “common view of the truth” through which decision makers are continually informed, underpinned and validated by hard evidence.
Over the past three years a number of new techniques have been developed to generate a set of consistent views which enable a much more objective basis for analysis and assessment of trade–off, leading to more effective and agile decision making. These techniques have been developed and tested through direct working with the UK MOD and several large commercial blue chip clients to ensure that they represent practical and effective solutions.
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