Capability Engineering

Capability engineering perspectives

The term capability is widely used across many industrial sectors and has begun to take on various specific meanings across, and even within, those sectors. Terms such as capability-based acquisition, capability engineering and management, Through Life Capability Management, capability sponsor, etc. are now ubiquitous in defense and elsewhere. Henshaw et. al. (2011) have identified at least eight worldviews of capability and capability engineering and concluded that the task of capability engineering is not consistently defined across different communities. Nevertheless, there are some common statements that one can make about capability engineering and its relationship to systems engineering.

Capability is the ability to do something; it is not a synonym for a system function or system purpose. A corollary of the statement above is that capability engineering is significantly different from product systems engineering and broader than (though it incorporates) the process perspective of systems engineering.

Capability engineering is very similar in scope to views of systems engineering such as Ring’s Value Cycle (Ring 2002) and layers 1-4 of Hitchins’ Five Layer Model (Hitchins 1994). Indeed, Capability engineering is the overarching approach that links value, purpose, and solution of a systems problem. As such, capability engineering comprises mindset (holistic thinking, assumptions), trade-offs, design, processes, values and policy, and outcomes. The processes for capability engineering are similar to traditional systems engineering, but the mindset and system boundary are different.

Capability is realised through a combination of components that include hard (equipment) and soft (people and processes) systems together with supporting services and infrastructure.

The relationship of capability to systems of systems can be colloquially summarised as Capability is an emergent property of systems of systems.

Services view of SoSE

As has been discussed throughout this section, ‘system of systems’ is typically viewed from the viewpoint of bringing together multiple systems to provide broader capability. As is discussed in the architecture section, the networking of the constituent systems in an SoS is often a key part of an SoS. In some circumstances, the entire content of an SoS is information and the SoS brings together multiple information systems to support the information needs of a broader community. These ‘information technology (IT) based’ SoS have the same set of characteristics of other SoS and face many of the same challenges. Current information technology has adopted a ‘services’ view of this type of SoS, and increasingly apply a ‘service oriented architecture’ approach to design and management (Erl, 2008). This approach decouples the architectural approach from the implementation, defining the functions to be provided across the SoS in terms of ‘services’. This approach allows for evolution of the underlying technical approaches in the supporting systems while maintaining continuity in supporting the needs of users across the SoS. While most commonly applied to IT based SoS, this services conceptualization of SoS can be applied to SoS of all types.

References

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Citations

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Erl T. 2008. SOA Principles of Service Design. Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series . ISBN: 0132344823.

Primary References

Henshaw M., Kemp D., Lister P., Daw A., Harding A., Farncombe A., and Touchin M. (2011) Capability Engineering - An Analysis of Perspectives. INCOSE 21st Int. Symp., Denver, US, 20-23 June.